Call us today!
1 866-326-8650
By Dan Haar, Hearst CT Insider Columnist
51 Sky Top Terrace, in Fairfield, Conn., July 3, 2024, the week the house sold to a Connecticut couple for $1.45 million. The legal cases around the house settled earlier in 2024, 18 months after a scammer sold the land that someone else owned. Police and the FBI have not announced any arrests.
Five months after a young couple bought a house in Fairfield that was built on land sold fraudulently by a title pirate, the FBI has announced no progress on solving the crime, and it seems likely it never will.
“I doubt the FBI will ever find them,” said Gina Leto, a partner in the development firm that built the house on Sky Top Terrace. It was, after all, a scam that netted the pirates less than $300,000. “This is like nothing to the FBI. I have never talked to the FBI; they’ve never called us.”
The case garnered attention around the world in the summer of 2023 after Dr. Daniel Kenigsberg discovered a mostly completed house on the market for just under $1.5 million on land he owned and never sold. It was an example of the unusual but growing trend of seller impersonation fraud; a scammer — a title pirate in essence — convinced lawyers and real estate agents that they were Kenigsberg.
Rarer still was that local developers, Leto and her business partner, Greg Bugaj, built a house on the nearly half-acre parcel before Kenigsberg, a Long Island doctor who grew up in a house next door to the parcel, discovered it.
The alleged fraudster claiming to be Kenigsberg told a lawyer handling the sale that he had moved to South Africa. The alleged fraudster provided fake identification and had the proceeds of the $350,000 land sale in late 2022 sent to a bank account, which, of course, later proved untraceable because it was set up with fake credentials.
Fairfield police investigated and soon turned the case over to the FBI, which, the police said, had a case in Rhode Island that apparently used the same bank account or routing number. The FBI, which does not typically comment on ongoing cases, has never said anything publicly about the scam at 51 Sky Top Terrace in Fairfield, not even acknowledging an investigation.
Now everyone involved has moved on with their lives. Multiple lawsuits by Kenigsberg and the developers were combined into one negotiated settlement, details of which are confidential. Leto and Bugaj have begun another project in Fairfield, an old house they bought and hope to tear down, to replace it with a newly built one. Fairfield land records filed on April 17 of this year show that the developers paid $965,000 to Kenigsberg in exchange for a clean title to the property. That could be the amount of the settlement; the principals are not allowed to comment under the confidentiality agreement.
It appears on a quick reading of the records that Leto and Bugaj had to spend $965,000 to “buy back” a parcel they thought they had bought more than a year earlier for $350,000. In fact, it’s likely that money came from multiple sources, or more precisely, from their insurers: Keller Williams, the original real estate brokerage that brought in the fake Kenigsberg; Anthony Monelli, the Trumbull lawyer on the seller’s side in that deal; CATIC, the title insurance company; and a lawyer working for the developers.
None of those people or companies is believed or suspected to have been involved in the crime. Fairfield Police have reported no new information in the case. Kenigsberg said earlier this year he’s bothered by the inability of police and FBI investigators to solve the crime. But solving it might be too much to ask in the digital world. Experts told me back in 2023 that online crimes of this sort can be nearly impossible to trace if they are discovered months after the fact.
The house sold in late June for $1.45 million to the same Connecticut couple that originally agreed to buy it for $1.475 million; they waited for their dream house to clear through the courts in a legal dispute the likes of which no one had seen before.
The entire industry of property buyers and sellers is being more careful as a result of a rise in seller impersonation attempts. This case was a sort of poster child for the title pirate danger. Monelli, the lawyer involved in the original land sale, speaks with industry groups about preventing scams of this sort.
And if the FBI announces a break in the case, it will surprise Gina Leto, who spent more than a year with the anxiety of having a 4-bedroom house she built on a previously wooded lot stuck in limbo.
She speculated: “I think they’ve filed that away and it’s not active.”
Original article: https://www.newstimes.com/news/article/no-arrest-in-fairfield-land-scam-19949847.php
