Lowell Deeds

That didn’t take long. Yesterday I wrote about a USA Today profile of a convicted real estate swindler who described a variety of scams he (and many others like him) have pulled off. A front page story in today’s Herald discloses a similar scheme right here in Massachusetts. In this case, a wrong-doer assumed the identity of a Massachusetts woman (a 63 year old retired school teacher who’s also a former nun) and used the phony identity to purchase three different properties. This incident may have remained unknown to the victim and the authorities but for a police investigation that was apparently prompted by a murder in an abandoned Dorchester house back at Thanksgiving. Mayor Menino vowed to find the absentee owner and when the authorities investigated, they stumbled onto this large scale real estate fraud operation. Several of the participants were recently arrested in a sting conducted by investigators posing as real estate lawyers who participated in one of these sham transactions at the Suffolk County Registry of Deeds. Unfortunately, when it comes to real estate fraud, with all the money involved during this latest spike in values, this case reported in the Herald may be just the tip of the iceberg. Speaking of icebergs, just so the historical record is clear, the temperature here in Lowell early this morning was -6 degrees with a stiff westerly wind making it the coldest day of the winter thus far.