A man has been jailed for three and a half years after selling a house he did not own.
Police said that he had conned solicitors, estate agents and a bank into believing he was the real owner, using forged identity details.
Sean McGowan, 43, from Partridge Green, West Sussex, was sentenced at the Central Criminal Court, London, following an investigation by Thames Valley Police’s economic crime unit. He had earlier admitted the offence.
The case involved a property in upmarket Sunningdale, Berkshire, that McGowan, using the false name Ian Mathewson, purported to be his own.
In May 2011, he sold the property to an unwitting property developer for £750,000. Around a month later the real owner of the house, named Moor End, discovered the fraudulent sale and asked police to investigate.
McGowan was traced by to his home in Sussex where he was arrested in July 2011.
All the money was recovered except £20,000.
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Comments
I once did this it was so funny and I got away with it too
ID verification cannot stop this, I nearly did the same thing back in the 90's - very scary. The only reason the guy didn't get away with it (he was the tenant) was because the owner came back from America and came in to the office demanding that I take down the sold board because I hadn't actually sold his house.
Then followed an awful lot of "Yes I have's" and "No you haven'ts".
After the dust settled, it was actually VERY funny, but really scary at the time.
The reason it worked was because the landlord had not told his building society he was letting the property and his mail redirection by Royal Mail ran out (2 year max apparently).
The tenant suddenly got a mortgage statement and came up with a plan.
He sat a driving test and was then able to go into a bank and set up an account in the original owner's name, but under his control.
The police said that there was absolutely no way that I could have prevented this from happening, short of knowing the original owner in the first place.
This was actually before the Money Laundering Regs, but I don't think that even doing those I would have been able to work it out.
Not so Badger. If he was using false documents the agent would have been fooled.
I thought that using an estate agent prevented this kind of thing happening.