However, in the event of an off-market cash transaction, a lot fewer parties are involved - potentially just a conveyancer/solicitor. I'm guessing it's them who hugely dropped the ball in identity verification.
If you've got the ID to sell the house, you certainly have enough ID to convince anyone else.
Single people are allowed mortgages. Certain property ownership forms are only available to married couples, and anything recorded in that form incorrectly will revert to a different form with different consequences if the owners were not qualified; there are also different provisions that might affect other interests in the property that apply based on the presence of absence of a marital relationship among the owners.
So, a lienholder is going to want to be as certain as possible about the actual relation of the parties.
The bank needs to know the status of the relationship because in the terrible event of it breaking up, your partner would have equity in the asset.
There is zero difference if you are married, best friends, siblings, co habitating, two people who had never met before etc. In all likelyhood a divorce would change the equity, not keep it 50-50.
Ok, now you have me curious. Whazzat?
In real life this is a simple task. You look at the photo on the ID, then you look at the person and check that they match. You also would immediately notice if something is weird, like they are wearing a lifelike mask, or they are a plastic doll.
Why does this not work for businesses then? There can be two reason: either they want to check the customers ID remotely through the internet, or the customer is present in their office but the business does not trust their own employees to check them.
Why would a business not trust their own employees? Because the company employees are in the best position to perpetuate some fraud on the business. Very often clerks receive some direct compensation or bonus based on how many new customers they subscribe for example, and if not properly checked this can incentivise the employees invent fake customers for you for example.
So you want to check the ID of a person in some way you can conduct remotely without trusting anyone physically present. Simple! You ask for an image of the ID and a photo of the customer, then a remote employee or machine learning model can decide if they match up.
But there is a problem with that! Anyone who is sophisticated enough to scam you with a fake ID will also be able to give you a matching photo. Ugh oh.
How do you solve this? You ask for the ID as previously, but instead of asking for a photo you ask for a video of the customer. Maybe you even flash the phone’s screen while recording the video with random colours and ask the customer to read up randomly selected digits. This way you can be sure that the video is not just some previous stock footage, or plastic doll or who knows. This is what is being refered to as “app-based liveness verification”
Now of course you might notice that this is an arms race. You make a better verification tool, and the scammers make a better scam. I bet that there is already someone out there training a neural network to create an animated deep fake which is convincing and can reflect the flashing colours appropriately and can read up the digits too. Likewise there is someone who is working on detecting that. What matters is that the business is trying to keep the cost of deception high enough so it is not worth doing at scale.
In other european countries like, say, Italy, Spain, France there are national ID's and - opposed to solicitors like in the UK - notaries which are a sort of public officials for the contract (and they will check and certify the identities of the people involved, besides the acts of property) and you won't likely be able to open an account or however cash a check (I mean large sums, like the sale of a house) with someone else's identity in any bank without proper ID.
Possibly, with at least two well forged pieces of ID[1], you can get around it in the bank, but I don't think it is easy.
[1] this is (or used to be) a common request, though I doubt it is Law, when you want to open a bank account in Italy, and you need to exhibit the actual documents, not a photo or similar.
A Solicitor has to due the legal due-diligence to make sure they have the right to sell including usually ownership of the title deeds but if you don't have the title deeds and they are held by the Land Registry in name only, this is fairly easy to get around.
I smell an insurance claim against the Solicitor but it depends whether they did everything correctly or not, otherwise I don't know where he stands.
Thinking about it, it does seem very open to abuse!
With an ambient concept of ownership, one is inherently left with a tradeoff between trusting the system as defined and being able to override it. In fact, this is exactly what caused this failure of the victim being unable to get their house back - compared to the common law deed system still prevalent in the US, whereby the buyer would be left without any title and would have to fall back on title insurance to be made whole.
The only way to eliminate fraud is to define away right and wrong, creating a single source of truth ala Bitcoin [0]. In Bitcoin if you have the privkey to a pubkey, then you can transfer value to a new pubkey, period - there is no such thing as theft, as it has been defined away. But obviously this isn't the kind of harsh regime people have in mind when they say they want to eliminate fraud.
FWIW the political problem in the US preventing national ID is the complete lack of ability to reign in corporate behavior. The ongoing abuse of SSN and drivers license numbers by private surveillance companies needs to be stopped (by something akin to the GDPR) before it would make any sense to talk about creating even stronger identification.
[0] Actually this is going to fail for Bitcoin as well, because it lacks the key ecash property of untraceability. Since it lacks fungibility, it's only a matter of time until courts routinely override the computational system with their own version of truth.
"Real ID" is now a thing. It's a "National ID". https://www.dhs.gov/real-id
https://www.dol.wa.gov/about/real-id-overview.html
REAL ID doesn't sound like a federal ID system, it's just security standards for state issued ID cards.
People don't necessarily have them either. Only those who have chosen to do so at a DMV.
SSNs are often assigned at birth, for people born in the US.
Surely you left a massive amount of money on the table then, right?
s/surely/potentially/
They may have been better off also. At least the agent commissions are saved, and maybe other costs. If the buyer is motivated to buy, who knows if they weren't already over market?
Big saving all round.
That's my point. You could potentially have made a lot more money on the open market. Especially if the buyers didn't even try to negotiate. That usually means they would pay more (let alone what other buyers might pay).
The value of your house is what people are willing to pay for it, not what you think it's worth or what you want for it.
Of course, most buyers will want to see the house themselves before making an offer, as estate agents are famously creative in their property descriptions. If you're getting a mortgage to buy a house, the bank will generally insist on a 'survey' where an independent third party turns up and confirms that the building physically exists and suchlike.
I bought my house right after it was listed on my realtors MLS system -- I had already made an offer before it ever hit Zillow or before there was a For Sale sign in the yard.
In the UK, it is very much a paperwork exercise, I have never met any of the solicitors I have sold houses with, haven't even spoken to most of them (everything on email)
They are not perfect, but it raises the bar.
Or is the 2FA not worth the paper it isn't printed on when it comes to replacements, and you're back to the same level of proof you need for a driving license or passport.
(B) You have to compromise both password and 2FA.
(C) Walking into a government office certainly raises the barrier to stealing ID.
It's largely because there is no "National ID" system in the US (due to political reasons). That makes it hard for companies to track people, and the SSN is the only number that people consistently have.
Are there any examples of countries where their government is getting this right and eliminating stupid fraud?