How thieves stole a Toronto condo and sold it for $970K

The professional photographs posted on a property tour website last year show Moffy Yu's condo in downtown Toronto, a light-filled two-bedroom home with floor-to-ceiling windows framing sweeping views from one of the tallest residential towers in Canada.

Documents provided by Yu show the home was listed for $978,000 last May 11, then sold for $970,000 nine days later, near the height of the pandemic property boom. Ontario land title documents show ownership was transferred for that sum on June 15 to a new buyer who took out a mortgage with the Bank of Montreal.

But Yu, a former international student who now lives in China's Hubei province, said she never put her home in the Aura skyscraper on Yonge Street — right in the downtown core — up for sale.

Instead, she said, it was stolen.

The property was listed by an impersonator who gained access to the vacant home, staged the photo shoot, listed it and sold it, all without her knowledge, she said. In the process, the impersonator appears to have duped the buyer, two sets of property agents, lawyers involved in the sale, a major bank and the Ontario land registry.

Toronto police confirmed there was an "active investigation" into the case but would release no further details. Bank of Montreal says it's standing by to help police, while the director of land titles placed a "caution" notice on the property title on Aug. 31.

Yu's experience, which she called "bizarre and shocking", is not isolated. It's part of what investigator Brian King calls "total title fraud," in which thieves impersonate true property owners by using fake identification.

King, of King International Advisory Group, looked into Yu's case on behalf of her title insurer, and said he could not comment on the specifics of her case.

But he said his firm had recently investigated several cases of total title fraud in the Greater Toronto Area. One involved a $2 million home sale.

He said the phenomenon involved "a fraudulent impostor" claiming to be the property's owner, having "manufactured and prepared identification."

He said total title fraud is "extremely problematic," because both a true homeowner and an unsuspecting new purchaser are victimized.

"The property sale, although a fraudulent transfer, is all performed in the proper legal processes which adds to the complications as this has to be all undone, which can take considerable time as it all has to go through the various judicial process," King said by email.

On Jan. 5, Toronto police asked for the public's help to solve a different case that closely resembles Yu's. It said that in January 2022, a man and woman listed a Toronto home for sale by using fake documents to impersonate the true owners. It was several months before the real owners, who were out of town, realized the property had been sold without their consent, police said in a news release.

Yu, 24, only noticed that "something unusual" was going on with her condo, which she bought in 2017 for more than $800,000, when her monthly property management fees weren't charged last July.