Recently, cases of fraud with apartments and private houses have become much more frequent. And above all, this applies to secondary housing and economy class. The fact is that an unprepared and insufficiently informed person is very difficult to navigate in all legal and financial transactions related to housing.
Fraudulent schemes
In fact, scammers have come up with a lot of schemes to deceive people. However, by and large, they can be divided into several categories:
- Manipulation and forgery with documents.
- Financial cheats.
- Underestimation or, conversely, overpricing when buying or selling real estate.
- Distortion of information and other types.
Currently, the most common way to cheat is the inaccuracy of data on the apartment. For clarity, you can consider an example.
Housing hoaxes
A family of two decided to deceive the buyer, get money from him, but at the same time stay with their own housing or part of it. For this, the husband and wife quarrel and disperse in advance. After some time, the wife turns to the police allegedly because of his disappearance. Now she can independently privatize the apartment, which before that was not their property, and then sell it.
The fraudulent scheme consists in the fact that the husband "rises" and, of course, is restored to his rights to the apartment. As a result, the new owners will receive an appendage in the form of a spouse- "loss". In the future, they will have two options: to buy back her husband’s share, spending additional funds, or to live with him in a communal apartment. The choice is obvious.
Expert Advice
What protection methods can be used? Realtors advise to complete all transactions only through reliable agencies. If this is not possible for any reason, then the following tips may come in handy:
- It is always necessary to check, and do it very carefully, all the information about the people who live in this housing area. This is done before buying an apartment. It is advisable that by the time of the transaction they were already written out.
- Check the apartment to exclude feigned deals. This is a special type of fraud, which is most often found between relatives who have shares in one apartment. According to the law, the owner of a share, wanting to sell it, must first offer to redeem it to those people who live in the apartment. And only in case of refusal to sell it to citizens who have no relation to the apartment. A sham transaction is giving a share to an unauthorized person and violating the rights of other interest holders to buy out.
- It must be ensured that the real value of the apartment is indicated in the contract of sale.
To avoid any mistakes or future problems, it is advisable to contact only professionals. Do not save on commissions. Competent realtors will help to verify the security of the transaction from the legal and financial side, and this, of course, is worth the commission.