This is a bit of a hypothetical, but my solicitor is being very non committal and the potential consequences of title fraud on a property I am buying is weighing on my mind.
For context, I am in the process of buying a house which costs the best part of £1m. Purchasing this involves selling my own mortgage free property and adding hundreds of thousands of my own cash to the pile in order to fund it.
The vendors I am buying from don't live in the UK. They have been renting their property out, but it is now vacant entirely, which means previous tenants and/or anyone else really would have potential access to the address to collect post or documents that might allow them (in a hypothetical worst case scenario) to perform identity theft upon the current owner, and essentially sell the property to me fraudulently.
Now, I have no indication that this is the case, and obviously the vendors solicitor (who is a reputable UK based firm) would be doing their due diligence to verify the identity of the person instructing the sale, but none the less, I have been thinking about what would happen if that title was sold to me fraudulently.
I suppose I'm interested in what the process would be, and what party would be most implicated, would I as the person duped into buying, be homeless and moneyless or would the theoretical defrauded current owner be the ones in a predicament, with me being the official owner of the property?
I have read many pages online but most talk about how to protect your own home from title fraud, not what happens if you're the buyer who buys a title obtained through fraud.
I have seen reference (on the Land Registry) site to a paragraph that implies that it would need to be the defrauded owner who would pursue compensation from the land registry to be made whole, but I can't seem to find much clarity.
I do realise this is a tiny risk. But it's my entire life that will be going into this purchase and I could not take the worry if something like this happened.
Is anyone aware of the legal recourse (would solicitors be at fault?) Or any sort of insurance or indemnity policy that I could purchase for peace of mind?
Appreciate anyone who has taken the time to read this far and comment.
