When a fraudulently obtained house costs $214k you may as well spend the $400k average house price in that city and avoid jail forever. Staying out of jail and continuing to work as a cop is easily worth more than $200k.
A real estate website tells me the average in that city is $400K. But it does seem pretty dumb to spend that amount of money on improvements when you know damn well your ownership is fraudulent and may come back to bite you.
I'd take that 214,000 figure with at least a grain of salt. That's the number he was asking to get paid back. Call me crazy but I don't totally trust him when it comes to details.
Assuming the identity of a dead person was (is still?) a common form of fraud. People (usually relatives) could collect pension and social security payments sometimes for years before being discovered (if they ever were).
It's crazy that we have such a disjointed system that someone can die and the Federal government is unable to timely discover and process death records.
Having known some cops, they tend to be really bad about thinking they are legal experts. Attorneys tend to know enough about how things are ruled to avoid falling for these types of 'legal' loopholes. Cops think they are more expert in legal matters than they actually are, and can fall for a hare brained scheme like this.
Ironically programmers are also just as bad for this type of thinking for a different reason. They will read a legal statute and interpret it like it is code. I was very much guilty of this, and from comments I see here that's not an uncommon assumption. My friend who's a public defender spend some time pointing out that legal rulings aren't strict in that way, there's a reason judges have leeway when making decisions.
> Sguros filed a complaint against the real estate company in February, saying in filings that he discovered West in the home while he was on duty and detailing how he subsequently began to clean, secure and invest in the property. However, he never established in his records that he came to be involved in the home through a purchase, lease, probate appointment, deed or relationship with West’s heirs, the arrest affidavit said.
Wow, cops certainly know how to produce a confession.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 9.0 ms ] threadIf he spent so much, why not just buy his own house? The house in the article is nothing special to look at.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50215874
Ironically programmers are also just as bad for this type of thinking for a different reason. They will read a legal statute and interpret it like it is code. I was very much guilty of this, and from comments I see here that's not an uncommon assumption. My friend who's a public defender spend some time pointing out that legal rulings aren't strict in that way, there's a reason judges have leeway when making decisions.
Wow, cops certainly know how to produce a confession.