Most have heard about the rise in identity theft which was recently highlighted by a report in the Observer online and hopefully we are all taking steps to minimize the chances of it occurring. But many will not be aware of property title fraud where fraudsters also steal legitimate property titles.

By impersonating the real owner of the property, such fraudsters can take out a mortgage on the property they do not own, keep the money thus leaving the real owners a huge mortgage and terrible debt to pay off.

Sadly, property title theft is also on the increase which has resulted in millions of pounds in compensation. One of the major difficulties with property title fraud is realising it has occurred since most owners have no idea what is happening until they try to sell their property, only to find that someone else has claimed title and re-mortgaged the property! In one particularly high-profile case, the Land Registry was required to pay out roughly £8million to two property developers who were fraudulently sold a 47-acre Berkshire estate. Four pensioners had lodged forged documents with the Land Registry, allowing them to masquerade as the owners and swindle £6.5million from the developers in 2004. » Read more: Property Title Fraud – What Is It?

It is not a long ago when performing property title search was a very hectic and tiring job. It not only consumed time and energy but it also consumed very heavy amount of money. Think for a second that you have to spend so many amounts yet on property purchase and cost but before purchasing you have to pay very healthy amount of money to the property dealer. Before the technology and industrialization era, property management considered to be the most difficult job to do. It is understood that property titles don’t locate near to your residence and in early days there were not good transportation services available, so in search of property, traveling from one place to other was very difficult task. Also internet was not there to Google things. People used to heavily rely only on real estate dealers and managers for buying the property. Most of the times, people were betrayed by the property dealers. Those cases, in which people got succeeded yet they found so many problems. So question arises, how to perform property title search? Luckily we are currently living in modern era and internet has already solved most of our difficult tasks. Below are some points to keep in mind always for successfully performing property title search.

If you are buying the property, you always need to demand for the real legal documents and papers of the property. Then you cross check these documents with the local authorities for any liability or fraud etc. After satisfactory results, it is your turn to look and search deeply about the property which you are going to buy. One of the methods is through internet. For this purpose you need to open a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing and investigate about the name of the property owner and then cross check with other names which may or may not appear with the property like witnesses and legal authorities etc. » Read more: How to Perform Property Title Search