Home Burglaries

Securing Your Home

We’re not referring to burglaries in your home, but rather the possibility of your actual home being robbed. Security methods are becoming constantly more necessary. This is not an exaggeration, as many might believe. Unwary citizens can easily be targeted by scammers who take advantage of the ability to execute the simplest of robberies – personal information, that later becomes money – up to the alternation of legal documents that can leave us in the street, literally.
In this day and age, everything is digitalized. With a doubt, society benefits from the growing and unstoppable process of digitalization. However, it’s essential to be cautious or one day we could be surprised by the news that our house is no longer ours.
Before robbers entered furtively into homes with fake keys or forcing locks open, in order to steal the contents of secret safes or to take whatever valuable objects they found along the way. 21st century scammers have evolved: now, instead of carrying things from the house, they prefer to take the whole house.
Not merely a few people have fallen victim to this new kind of robbery. The method seems simple enough, although it requires great skills. It starts with a confident owner wanting to rent their home. As logic indicates, one of their first steps, if they don´t want to do it themselves, is to contact a rental agency, which will put the property on a rental list.
Certainly the future leaseholder will be pleased when the phone rings and, from the other end, an attentive voice states that there is a person interested in renting their home. The person will gladly accept the required fees and, furthermore, will pay up to two months in advance.
So far, everything seems great. The owner gets their money and they use it for things that seem the most important for improving their way of life. Still, all’s well. Until, one day, perhaps by chance, the owner passes by their rented house and discovers that several construction workers are working on it. They scream, trying to stop them, but they respond saying that they are carrying out the orders of the “owner”.
The owner? This is very moment in which the real owner understands that something is very wrong: someone has taken what was their house, or better yet, some faceless person has sold their house to another person. Once more logic returns to the startled owner, causing them to run to agency. There they discover that “someone” snuck into the records that they themselves had deposited in the agency, falsified bank and commercial information - which just happens to be digitalized – and later on, was consented the deed to the house and simply sold it to the highest bidder.
“Why did this happen to me?” one might ask oneself more than a million times. This situation could have happen to anyone, even in the most remote part of the world. It all started with the ignorance of the now ex-owner. He forgot the most essential rules: when buying a property is fundamental to receive a copy of the deed; later it’s important to verify the information in a notary. You also can´t forget that deeds are public and any person can access them. The worst danger being that a possible scammer can modify the deeds and change our lives forever. For this reason, security companies and Lawyers have diversified the offers and services offered to their potential clients so that they continue to be accurate and up to date.
The most important thing is to be cautious and savvy, once and for all, and realize that in a world that is interconnected and digitalized, information is a valuable resource. It is also, at the same time, so easy to manipulate, that we should check almost everything. If we don´t, we could end up sleeping not exactly in the place we dreamed of.