Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's the Real Estate Podcast brought to you by ANZ Home Loans for financial well-beings. And welcome to another episode of the Real Estate Podcast available on iHeartRadio every morning and on Spotify and Apple and wherever you get your podcasts from. Tuesday morning is here, the 11th day for October for 2022 and coming up, it's a good one. Well, it's not really a good one.
It's bad, but it's an interesting one to find out more about. We are taking a look at fraud. Now, we know what a joyride is when somebody goes into a car yard, has no intention of buying the car, and just like wasting the time of a dealership, it seems that people are doing this with real estate. Not just any old real estate, real estate that is worth $15 to $20 to $25, $30 million.
So we're going to talk to Cassandra Cross about why somebody would go into a high-end luxury property with an agent and and pretend that they've got millions of dollars and spin a line and waste everybody's time. And don't just think this is one or two people. It seems that this is happening quite a bit around Australia.
And we'll also talk to Munro, a buyer's agent, who has had an example of a complete plonker wasting his time in exactly this fashion. So we'll take a look at all of that next.
it's your weekday real estate breakfast with news interviews and predictions every morning on the real estate podcast it's the main center forecast with prd selling smarter every day on this tuesday morning let's head around australia checking on your weather and in sydney expecting partly cloudy skies should be mainly dry today 21 degrees Also mainly dry in Melbourne, 22 is your forecast high.
Brisbane should be mainly fine, 24 is your forecast top and expecting 21 degrees in Perth and a mostly fine and sunny day. We talk with leading property commentators with analysis, predictions, forecasts, and what's trending every morning from 6.30. Well, there is a bit of an oddity that is happening in the space of high-end luxury properties.
Firstly, we know people have made small fortunes in the real estate market. But some people want to give the impression to others that they are highly successful individuals and with that lie about their wealth and what they are up to. And I want to welcome into the podcast this morning Associate Professor Cassandra Cross of the School of Justice at the Queensland University of Technology.
Hey Cassandra, good morning to you. Welcome to The Real Estate Breakfast. Good morning and thank you for having me. This is really weird, isn't it, what people are up to?
It's probably not as weird for me, having worked in this area for over a decade, but it's certainly, I guess, just another example of the lengths to which offenders will go to in order to try and gain a financial advantage and get some money. Yeah, that's the key, is gaining a financial advantage.
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Chapter 2: What types of fraud are prevalent in the real estate market?
and how he was able to groom and manipulate several women into giving him, I think it was tens or if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah. And the power, it's a power play because while I was watching it thinking, how could you be sucked in by this person? Because the guy, in terms of his personality, he was just so fake with the way that he was doing it. But I think
You look at social media and the way that people hobnob, and this is people that actually have money, that are very flashy. They like showing off on their Instagram accounts. They might have bought a new car. This kind of just helped people dovetail into this whole lie, this conspiracy of fraud with what he was doing.
It's certainly very challenging from the outside to watch a documentary like that or to have friends or family that are going through the experience. And it's difficult for an outsider to really understand the dynamics of the relationship and to, I guess, try and understand how the victim doesn't see what's actually happening.
But I think that really demonstrates the reality of fraud victimization and it demonstrates the various techniques that offenders deliberately use to in order to manipulate and to exploit victims.
So offenders will use a variety of grooming techniques, they'll use a variety of social engineering techniques such as urgency and authority and this idea of status and wealth that we've spoken about and in several cases they'll also use a number of psychological abuse techniques in order to I guess deliberately and purposefully lure the victim in and get them to do things that they otherwise wouldn't do in different circumstances.
Now, there was a recent article about this with Domain last week, and one of the real estate agents was talking about showing some of these scammers through property, and we'll didn't quite get the end game because they didn't hear from that person again, but they found out that they didn't have any money. So talk to that. What are they up to there? Are they taking photos?
How is that all sort of working in the end game for fraud? Sure. So, in those particular circumstances, the end game is not likely to be the property itself. So, it's not surprising that the real estate agent doesn't have any further contact. What I would assume is happening in those situations is that the offender is using the open houses, the properties,
to build up that image of status and wealth. So if they're in a relationship with someone, for example, and going to look at multi-million dollar properties on the premise that they're looking to buy it, they're portraying this image of wealth and of power.
And therefore, when they then ask that person for money down the track, which is likely to happen, there'll be some emergency, some reason why they can't access their accounts and
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Chapter 3: Why do people pretend to have wealth when buying luxury properties?
And they'll ask for an amount of money from the victim and the victim likely won't think twice knowing that the person says they're good for it, that they've demonstrated that they're good for it around the fact that they are looking to purchase properties and probably other high-end vehicles and other things like that. Yeah, so that's pretty interesting, Cassandra.
Let's right now bring in Munro Donan from Property Buyer. And good morning, Munro. I understand that you've got your own experience with deception and fraud in this area. What happened? Yeah, Craig, really interesting story.
I had an experience last year during the COVID where I was approached by a 15 to 20 million dollar buyer who had moved here from New Zealand, who was looking to buy a prestige property in the eastern suburbs. and went out looking for specific properties. He had very specific requirements and specific architectural design that he liked. He also wanted to look at the North Shore.
So together with Rich, we put together a couple of opportunities in Mossman and on the Lower North Shore. And we started our journey with this particular gentleman. And eventually we found a particular property in Bellevue Hill on Warren Road, went to see the property a couple of times, said to me, what do you think it's worth? I did a bit of due diligence and homework.
I said to him, look, anywhere between 16, 250 and 17. I said to him, do you have a solicitor? He said, no. Can you refer me to somebody? I said, sure. I referred him to one of the solicitors we work with. And the process with a buyer's agent is early on, we check if the client has finance. And he said to me, I don't need finance. I'm a cash buyer. I said, great.
With no disrespect, I do need to have some evidence that you have the funds available. Absolutely no problem, he said to me. The solicitor had referred him to and sent the contract to, never returned calls to them, and yet still carried on playing the game.
He arrived here from New Zealand with this lady he'd met, a very attractive Brazilian lady who I didn't meet because he'd broken up with her, he told me, by the time he'd come on to me and started working with me.
And I don't understand what it is, Craig, if people just have so much time on their hands to waste or they have an inferiority complex or what it is that drives them to behave in this manner. Okay, well, yeah, very strange behaviour. Munro, thanks for jumping on the call and talking to us this morning about that terrible experience. Thank you, Craig. Always a pleasure.
Cassandra, I guess because the real estate market over the last two and a half plus years has been so hot that maybe there's a lot of misreporting, underreporting of this sort of abuse going on around the place. Oh, absolutely. So we know that fraud statistics generally, fraud is one of the lowest categories of crime reported.
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