Jess Battison
The £1.2 million house that hit the headlines after it was claimed to have been fraudulently built on a man’s land without his permission has now been sold.
Back in 1991, Dr Daniel Kenigsberg bought a half-acre plot right by his childhood home in Fairfield, US.
The bloke had hopes to pass it onto his family and rejected offers from buyers with one in 2022 of $400,000 (£314,000). However, the land still ended up being ‘sold’ in October 2022 to Sky Top Partners LLC for $350,000 (£275,000) due to a scam.
And while Kenigsberg was obviously pretty p**sed, so were his neighbours who said the spot was an ‘eyesore’ in the area. Construction began on his land without him ever knowing, as a friend rang him last year to say developers had started work on a new property while he was living on Long Island.
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There were concerns from residents who worried about how long this project was going to take while Kenigsberg admitted he ‘felt bad for the builder’.
Now, CT Insider reports the scandal-surrounded home at 51 Sky Top Terrace has been sold for a whopping $1.45 million (£1.2 million) after a settlement was reached.
The developers of the pricey home claim they were scammed by someone impersonating the landowner.
It’s said that the scammer in this case used Johannesburg, South Africa for their address and had made a fake passport in Kenigsberg’s name which had the wrong birthday and photo.
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Terms of the settlement from this viral case haven’t been disclosed but the bloke reportedly received a payment. The fraud case was first investigated by Fairfield’s police department, which later handed it over to the FBI but it is still reportedly unsolved.
Consumer protection lawyer Kevin Kneupper suggests Kenigsberg’s claims aren’t particularly outlandish, as it’s rather simple to pose as a landowner.
"It's really easy to go find who owns land. If you've never done searches on this, in most counties, you can actually just go, it depends on your state,” he explained.
“But in many places, you just search online, they'll have databases, so they could find out real easily who's the actual owner and then just pretend to be him.
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"Now, to be clear, his attorney and Mr. Kenigsberg, they are not accusing the people who bought it of being involved. They think that they sort of didn't know what was going on, and that someone in South Africa did this.
"And that's who the police are trying to go after to find where the money actually went to when they paid for it."
Well, looks like it’s all over for Kenigsberg’s land now.
LADbible contacted Sky Top Partners LLC for comment.