Organized Crime & Land Titles Frauds & Scams
Organized crime flourishes in areas of dysfunctional land registration for a variety of reasons.
These include the ability to transform cash money into real property and hide the assets, the generalized
corruption of public registration systems which leads to an increase in false
identities and fraudulent schemes to obtain government benefits and an increase in insurance
crimes.
What do you mean by organized crime?
In this paper what is usually conceived as organized crime is defined as ordinary people who become involved in the area of subverting registration systems and effecting identity fraud and
effecting identity fraud for profit. It can also include the illegal gathering, alteration and misuse of data for illegal purposes. The definition of "organized crime" adopted
by this paper is the same as that described by Gary Potter in his work on organized crime in Kentucky.
How does organized crime link to dysfunctional land registration?
Those people involved in criminal activities, including growing cash hemp crops, for example, need to have some way of turning
the illegal cash into some sort of property. The hemp-grower who has made say, $60,000 from selling marijhuna, cannot spend that amount of money without
attracting the attention of either the police or the taxation authorities. He therefore needs to find a way to turn the cash into property.
He also needs to hide that property. For instance if he buys a smart new motor vehicle or a new house the title will turn up in his name in the land or car registries.
He could of course get a friend or relation to act as a nominee to buy the property for him. However there would be a real danger that if he placed the title in some-one
else's name, that the nominee might then claim the property as the indefeasibility of title means that the nominee has good title.
It would be very convenient for the criminal to be able to subvert the registry in some way so that while being able to buy property, he can have the property held in some-one
else's name while the nominee is restrained from dealing with the property. The best way to do this is to spoil the title registration of the nominee.
The nominee's title can be spoiled in a number of ways as if the nominee decides to "do the dirty" on the hidden proprietor, he has to effect a transfer through the Lands, Titles
Office. A transfer will be rejected in the Lands, Titles Office under certain circumstances these are:
if the names on the folio of the register and the transfer do not match, if the number of tenants in common on the folio of the register and the transfer do not match; if the land
area is not the same size on the transfer as specified on the plan held in the Lands, Titles Office and if the folio number is not the same.
In other words, many of these nominee owners are visible by simple searching in the state Lands, Titles Office to find out if the registration of the apparent
owner has been spoiled in any way.
The criminal is then able to continue in his illegal pursuits and accumulate much land without his ownership being visible. The nominee owner can't sell off the criminal's
land as his registration has been subverted.
While this continues everyone is happy, land sales continue, land prices continue to increase and criminals can continue to launder cash. However real problems can arise in
this situation if this dysfunction in the land registry continues.
So what can happen, this is probably how major cities in America have been developed by organized crime?
In order for the nominee to be able to obtain a certificate of title in his name with his name misspelled for instance, then there must be a lack of effective
auditing in the Lands, Titles Office. In other words there are major loopholes in the system. By the time that criminal elements can subvert the registers in this simple way there
has to be major breakdowns in the legal system, judiciary, police and political systems. The reason is that in a normally operating environment such simple abuses of registries would have
to be picked up by the many departments and systems which control the land registration process. The only reason for such simple abuses not being picked up is that there is a systematic and
generalized situation of wilful blindness towards the subverting of primary state registries.
It is important to note here that there is no suggestion of deliberate corruption or wrongful behaviour in creating this situation. The situation arises from historical and systemic factors
and has nothing to do ultimately with morals or ethics. The "looking away" from problems in the Lands, Titles Register has more in common with a situation known as bystander
effect rather than moral turpitude.
However the fear of compromise is often worse than compromise itself and while all sectors of the administration concerned with ensuring the integrity of the land registration system are
simply looking the other way, then a situation ofnegative evolution can develop. Those familiar with studies of the Holocaust know that when negative
evolution arises, those most base and criminal elements in society will start to take charge at a local level. This situation was seen in Germany before World War 2 and was also seen in
Bosnia prior to recent events.
Another situation which can arise when "organized crime" takes charge of the Lands, Titles registers is that many unsuspecting people can be sold fake land titles with fake mortgages attached
and can unknowingly be repaying their loan to organized crime rather than to the bank.
Then this is a hopeless situation. How do you get organized crime out of the Lands, Titles registries?
To a major extent organized criminals are just ordinary people like you and I. As discussed previously organized crime is not a lot of scary people carrying machine guns.
They are everyday people who we all know locally. These people are just acting in an economically rational way by making use of present loopholes in the system. It is important to note that
the subverting of the lands, titles registries by lawyers on behalf of their wealthier clients has been going on for centuries.
What the criminal elements engaging in subverting the Lands, Titles registers need to understand is that participating in dysfunctional registration does have a serious negative aspect.
What happens is that as more and more people engage in dysfunctional registration then this makes the lands titles register more and more unworkable. If the land titles register becomes
unworkable, then serious problems may occur. One of these problems is that as the lands registry becomes more and more dysfunctional, bigger and bigger criminal organizations
This is really because the land tenure system is reversing and there will
be attempts to revive the old underlying original deeds under residential
subdivisions.
The new criminal elements which enter the system to try to re-register on old underlying deeds are
likely to be major crime groups of an international nature and can include any sort of group with a
common illegal purpose. This situation threatens both local indentities involved in petty graft and
influence peddling, ordinary residents and local criminals alike.
It is therefore important to not directly approach the matter by trying to weed out criminal elements. it
is better to approach the matter by looking at how dysfunctional land registration threatens everyone and
how many upstanding citizens are involved to some extent in making the land registration system dysfunctional than pick out
certain groups to be a scapegoat for these problems.
What other problems are related to dysfunctional registration?
If the land registry is producing false titles, that is certificates of title which have not been
checked against a particular parcel of land and haven't been registered - these proprietors of these
false certificates of title will attract other false files and accounts to go with the fake certificate. The reason
for this is that the complex audit trail and system of cross referencing which is related to the certificate of title. Someone
who has a false land title will end up having false land rates, water rates and land tax. The major reason is the need to bypass the
official paper trail, but also because someone else obviously still owns the property and there may be a need for that person to
retain the offficial "address" and to still continue to pay rates and land tax on that property in order to make an adverse
possession case on the property at a later date.
People who have these false files and accounts will often have their names misspelled on accounts, the
title numbers and property identification numbers will often show transpositions for example 3456 will become 3465 or vice versa.
The reason for these transpositions is to create an additional file in the charging authorities database or filing system.
What does adverse possession have to do with organized crime?
Syndicates of criminal elements can adversely possess by registration, large areas of land, even whole towns. They can then harass unknowing proprietors
to get them to move and place nominees on the property who have raised the money to buy the property through illegal activities.
After a number of years the organized crime grouping can make an adverse possession claim or even claim that a deed has been lost or destroyed and
re-register on the whole area of the original land grant for instance.
The organized crime grouping can do this as they probably have large numbers of false accounts and receipts which show that they legitimately own the
properties concerned and have owned them for the required amount of years. Clerical workers will participate in producing these false accounts and
receipts from local councils for example, mainly because they are either frightened of the criminal elements involved or they might be just greedy.
The ability for organized crime to become involved in large rural areas for example, and subvert the land tenure is a major
factor for society to consider mainly because we need genuine farmers to produce food.
