An advance-fee scam is a form of fraud and is one of the most common types of confidence tricks. The scam typically involves promising the victim a significant share of a large sum of money, in return for a small up-front payment, which the fraudster claims will be used to obtain the large sum. If a victim makes the payment, the fraudster either invents a series of further fees for the victim to pay or simply disappears.
A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors. Named after Italian businessman Charles Ponzi, the scheme leads victims to believe that profits are coming from legitimate business activity, and they remain unaware that other investors are the source of funds. A Ponzi scheme can maintain the illusion of a sustainable business as long as new investors contribute new funds, and as long as most of the investors do not demand full repayment and still believe in the non-existent assets they are purported to own.
A pyramid scheme is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products. As recruiting multiplies, recruiting becomes quickly impossible, and most members are unable to profit; as such, pyramid schemes are unsustainable and often illegal.
This aims to be a complete list of the articles on real estate.
A real estate agent, referred to often as a real estate broker, is a person who represents sellers or buyers of real estate or real property. While a broker may work independently, an agent usually works under a licensed broker to represent clients. Brokers and agents are licensed by the state to negotiate sales agreements and manage the documentation required for closing real estate transactions. Buyers and sellers are generally advised to consult a licensed real estate professional for a written definition of an individual state's laws of agency.
A timeshare is a property with a divided form of ownership or use rights. These properties are typically resort condominium units, in which multiple parties hold rights to use the property, and each owner of the same accommodation is allotted their period of time. Units may be sold as a partial ownership, lease, or "right to use", in which case the latter holds no claim to ownership of the property. The ownership of timeshare programs is varied, and has been changing over the decades.
Flipping is a term used to describe purchasing a revenue-generating asset and quickly reselling it for profit.
The Florida land boom of the 1920s was Florida's first real estate bubble. This pioneering era of Florida land speculation lasted from 1924 to 1926 and attracted investors from all over the nation. The land boom left behind entirely new, planned developments incorporated into towns and cities. Major investors and speculators such as Carl G. Fisher also left behind a new history of racially deed restricted properties that segregated cities for decades. Among those cities at the center of this bubble were Miami Beach, Coral Gables, Hialeah, Miami Springs, Opa-locka, Miami Shores, and Hollywood. It also left behind the remains of failed development projects such as Aladdin City, Boca Raton, Chevelier, Fulford-by-the-Sea, Interocean City, Isola di Lolando, Okeelanta, Palm Beach Ocean, Poinciana, and Sun City. The land boom shaped Florida's future for decades and created entire new cities out of the Everglades land that remain today. The story includes many parallels to the real estate boom of the 2000s, including the forces of outside speculators, easy credit access for buyers, and rapidly appreciating property values, ending in a financial collapse that ruined thousands of investors and property owners, and crippled the local economy for years thereafter.
Employment fraud is the attempt to defraud people seeking employment by giving them false hope of better employment, offering better working hours, more respectable tasks, future opportunities, or higher wages. They often advertise at the same locations as genuine employers and may ask for money in exchange for the opportunity to apply for a job.
Land banking is the practice of aggregating parcels of land for future sale or development.
A work-at-home scheme is a get-rich-quick scam in which a victim is lured by an offer to be employed at home, very often doing some simple task in a minimal amount of time with a large amount of income that far exceeds the market rate for the type of work. The true purpose of such an offer is for the perpetrator to extort money from the victim, either by charging a fee to join the scheme, or requiring the victim to invest in products whose resale value is misrepresented.
A mock auction is a scam usually operated in a street market, disposal sale or similar environment, where cheap and low quality goods are sold at high prices by a team of confidence tricksters.
A U.S. federal law, the Swamp Land Act of 1850, fully titled "An act to enable the State of Arkansas and other States to reclaim the swamp lands within their limits", essentially provided a mechanism for reverting title of federally-owned swampland to states which would agree to drain the land and turn it to productive, agricultural use. Primarily aimed at the development of Florida's Everglades, and transferring some 20 million acres of land in the Everglades to the State of Florida for this purpose, the law also had application outside Florida, and spurred drainage and development in many areas of the United States, including areas around Indiana's Kankakee River, Michigan's Lake St. Clair's shores, and elsewhere, and encouraged settlement by immigrants arriving in the United States after that time. Later considered to have been ecologically problematic, many of its provisions were in time reversed by the Clean Water Act of 1972 and later legislation, but its historical effects on U.S. development and settlement patterns remained.
A national push for expansion and progress toward the latter part of the 19th century stimulated interest in draining the Everglades, a region of tropical wetlands in southern Florida, for agricultural use. According to historians, "From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, the United States went through a period in which wetland removal was not questioned. Indeed, it was considered the proper thing to do."
Christie's International Real Estate is an international network of independently owned luxury real estate firms with more than 400 offices and approximately 10,000 real estate agents in nearly 50 countries and territories around the world. The brand is separately owned but strategically partnered with Christie’s, the fine art auction house.
The Mackle brothers - Elliott, Robert and Frank Jr. - were a group of three brothers who were real estate developers. They would popularize selling land in planned communities through installment plans in Florida creating several communities in the process.
The art student scam is a confidence trick in which cheap, mass-produced paintings or prints are misrepresented as original works of art, often by young people pretending to be art students trying to raise money for art supplies or tuition fees. The sellers mostly represented themselves as French art students, but the scam has recently been copied internationally, with instances of Chinese, Chilean, Nigerian and other nationalities posing as art students or dealers in Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States since around 2000. The art is often sold in exhibition sites or art galleries. Many scammers operate alongside and at the long-run expense of genuine art students who show their yearly work in festivals during the summer vacation.
The Mantria Corporation Ponzi scheme has been described as the "biggest green energy scam" in United States history. A Federal judge in the Securities and Exchange Commission's civil case found Mantria had scammed more than $54.5 million “by egregiously, recklessly, knowingly, and shamelessly perpetrating a fraudulent scheme” that used “misrepresentations, omissions, and blatant lies to induce unsuspecting and unwitting victim investors to liquidate the equity in their homes and take out bank loans to invest in Defendants’ scheme, which was nothing more than smoke and mirrors.” On November 16, 2009, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged four people who targeted those nearing retirement age who were seeking real estate and "green" investments. Many of these securities were offered by Mantria Corporation.
Gulf American Land Corporation (GALC) was a land development company in Florida founded by brothers Leonard and Jack Rosen. During the late 1950s and 1960s, GALC was the largest land sales company in the United States. The company is noted for its role in the development of Cape Coral, Florida, and pioneering the sales method of instalment land purchases.
