Same here. We completed over the summer and even had to provide our marriage certificate to the bank (no idea why, are single people not allowed mortgages?). Sounds very much like the conveyancers (lawyers) screwed up massively. There still some bits of this story I don't understand. Like, how did the fraudster get access to the house in the first place? Did he break in then fix the damage and replace the locks so he had a set of keys to give to the "buyer"?

The breaking in is not really that hard. It could be a simple as calling a locksmith, telling them you were out of town on business and lost your keys, and asking them to re-key or replace the locks.

If you've got the ID to sell the house, you certainly have enough ID to convince anyone else.

> We completed over the summer and even had to provide our marriage certificate to the bank (no idea why, are single people not allowed mortgages?).

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.

>no idea why, are single people not allowed mortgages?

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.

The mortgage lists the equity, joint implies 50-50 unless you were to specify otherwise.

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.

But if you die without a will there will be different heirs for your part of the property.

So the bank really should be asking for a copy of the will rather than a certificate of marriage.

"app-based liveness verification"

Ok, now you have me curious. Whazzat?

Imagine that you run a business where it is important to properly check the ID of your customer. You need to know two things: the photographic ID matches the person, and there is a real living person present there, not just some scammer who stole the ID.

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.

Still need a purchase contract. But it's insane to me that UK law would allow for someone to forge documents in a civil matter and get away with it.