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This has got to be hands-down my favorite story. This was back several years ago during the pandemic with a listing I had up for sale. We were doing an open house and in walks a buyer, we'll call him Bob, who loved the house. He had found the house, his agent wasn't doing anything for him so he fired him and wanted to buy this mulit-million dollar home with me representing him. Ladies and Gentlemen, that is the dream all real estate agents have, however this dream quickly turned into a nightmare.
I wrote the offer, he signed it, I did all the required dual agency disclosures and treated it like any of the several other dual agency deals I've done... with kid gloves. He wrote a great offer, full price, cash, and very clean. But the problems began when we had to get the earnest money deposit in. He kept having problems with the wire. His money was coming from the sale of a home in Arizona and he'd have cash for the full amount and wanted to send it all at once. After several delays in his escrow closing and after several attempts to send failed and he then stated that "he's been the victim of identity theft in the past and is having his lawyer in Chicago handle the money." This lawyer was also in court a lot and would miss deadlines for sending the wire. Bob was also "out of pocket" teaching seminars in Palm Desert and couldn't be reached, which I tried to figure out how he did that since the state was closed. At one point the lawyer said the Fed had put a restriction on how much could be transfered, I called one of my oldest and closest friends, who happens to be in insurance and moves lots of money regularly for clients. He moves multiples of what the lawyer said couldn't be moved.
Now they start pushing for using a cashier's check. Pushing very hard. Being in real estate, we only want to see wires and that's what the contract has. Our fantastic escrow officer at Glenn Oaks Escrow was on our side and her company's policy did not allow for anything other than a wire. I asked why, turns out it's all about the seasoning of the money. No, not with spices. Cashier's checks are no different than a regular check. The money needs SIX MONTHS to be considered deposited and "seasoned" and it can be rescinded at any time prior to that. Wired funds are considered seasoned immediately and cannot be revoked. The lawyer in Chicago and "Bob" (who I'm convinced were one and the same) thought that was crazy and kept insisting that they have bought properties in Malibu with a cashiers check just six months ago.
Prior to this, title did their normal research on the buyer and because he had a very common last name, they asked for his social so they could rule out the false positives. Bob got irate at this, brought up the identity theft, and eventually bullied the title company (not our normal company) into accepting a middle name.
Now by this point, I'm tired of the games so I do some digging. I guess "Bob" didn't look at my about page where I mention how I do intelligence research for the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. I went back and looked at 12 months of transactions in Malibu, Bob was not a part of any of them. I researched the Chicago lawyer, no lawyer with the name had passed the bar in Illinois, though the name did come back to a DUI attorney in Tennessee. Bob was from Arizona, I searched his name and his wife's name (different last name and not a common one). There were a lot of land deals that were sold suspiciously low in her name, nothing in his, but I did see some criminal compliants but given the common nature of his name, I couldn't rule them in or out.
I took all of this information to my friend and top real estate attorney Jennifer Felten, founder of RELAW, APC. and she knew right off the bat that this was an attempt at real estate fraud. It also happens that Jennifer was the legal counsel for the Ventura County Real Estate Fraud Advisory Team, out of the District Attorney's office. The goal was to purchase the house with a fraudulent cashier's check then once it records, and there is nothing that the prior owner can do, they would recall the cashier's check and sell the home for pennies on the dollar. My client would have been out the house and out the money and royally screwed.
With this information in hand, we sent Bob a notice to perform and canceled the contract when the wire never arrived.
This is where it pays to have a VERY good and connected agent! It doesn't hurt when they know their way around Open Source Investigations and did it for a decade with the Sheriff's Department and even helped to put some bad people behind bars with the skill.
What an end to the story, right? Well, it's not over yet! My clients ended up keeping the house and turning it into an Air B&B, which I managed for them since I also do property management. Three times over the next couple of years I found title documents in our mailbox for transactions he was trying to perform in Arizona!! Each time I'd call the agents involved and the title/escrow company(ies) and warn them. Thankfully, Bob was true to his habits and the sellers had canceled the deals by the time I got the mail. Here is where I reached out to my FBI contacts and asked them since it crossed state lines, was there anything that we could do. Did I mention I'm connected? Since no crime was actually committed, the best was to contact the Postmaster General and have them open an investigation for fraudulently using a mailing address.
So one day I get a call from an agent in Arizona. Bob was still giving the house's address out and the agent did some excellent cyber sleuthing and found my advertising for it as a short-term rental. Here's where it gets EVEN MORE interesting... she was HIS AGENT! She was about ready to fire him because of the games he was playing and was trying to figure out why he gave out this address. We had a nice chat that backed up everything she was seeing personally and what she was seeing in the local realtor facebook community about him. We kept in touch and a few months later I get a call from her. Bob had been arrested for identity theft and fraud and was behind bars! Turns out somehow a brother or cousin (I forget which) in Chicago had found the Facebook group and gave them the lowdown on him. It wasn't his first time doing time for identity theft and fraud. He had done time previously in Chicago and had ripped off this guy's family.
So this story, as long and twisty as it is, does have a happy ending. My clients were protected, the bad guy eventually met up with Johnny Law and is doing time in a state where they put the hard in hard labor.
