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(NEW YORK) — When a man claiming to own a vacant Randolph, New Jersey, investment property called real estate agent Lisa Shaw last summer, she thought it would be the start of another typical real estate transaction in the Garden State suburbs.

“He said he had this piece of property for over 25 years in Randolph, even though he had never been to Randolph,” Shaw told ABC News. 

She said she asked the man why he wanted to put this land on the market.

“He said, ‘Well, real estate is really high right now.’ He thought he could get the best dollar for it,” Shaw said. “He also told me his wife was ill and he needed the proceeds from that money for his wife’s illness.”

Shaw says she did not realize that not only did the man on the phone not actually own the property in question — but that this one phone call would ultimately connect that vacant lot to an alleged international crime web that authorities say involves fake documents ranging from Canada to Vietnam.

The incident is just the latest example of what the FBI says is a growing and troubling new form of fraud affecting unsuspecting landowners nationwide.

“Who would ever think that somebody would sell your own property from right under your nose, without your knowledge, and be able to dupe the system and everyone involved in that transaction?” Jim Dennehy, assistant director in charge of the FBI for New York, told ABC News Chief Business Correspondent Rebecca Jarvis.

‘No one suspected it’

Shaw, who has been selling properties in and around Randolph for more than two decades, says that after she spoke with the purported property owner, she asked him for documentation.

The man said that he and his wife were Canadian citizens living in England, and he provided a British address and copies of what appeared to be their driver’s licenses from the Canadian province of Ontario.

What Shaw didn’t know was that the property in Randolph was actually owned by a husband and wife from Texas. When the driver’s licenses arrived, they had the names of the real owners — just not their Texas address.

“Everything looked fine,” Shaw said, explaining that she proceeded to put the land up for sale and immediately received around 10 offers.

But the licenses turned out not to be fine. An official with Canada’s Peel Regional Police told ABC News that both identification cards were fake.

Although the licenses contained real addresses in the Toronto area, the owner of the home at one of those addresses told ABC News that she has no idea how her address ended up being listed on the fake identification card, and that she had nothing to do with an attempted property sale in New Jersey. The owner of the home at the British address, an attorney, said the same thing — but he suspected that scammers could have found his home address in England because he used to own property in Florida.

Back when the property in Randolph was getting ready to be sold, Shaw says no one involved detected that this was a scam.

“No one suspected it, not the attorneys, not myself, not the title company,” she said.

When the supposed property owner asked Shaw about the offers that had come in, Shaw said she told him that the highest one was for $140,000, and that he told her to immediately accept the offer.

Sale documents were soon prepared and the man provided paperwork that purportedly showed he had gotten the deed notarized at the U.S. embassy in Vietnam.

In December, the deal closed — all while the real property owners had no clue that the transaction had taken place. The supposed seller asked for the $140,000 payment to be split in half and sent to two different banks, according to Shaw.

But the title company encountered trouble while attempting to submit the second $70,000 payment.

“That set off the red flag,” explained Shaw, who said that the title company was then able to get in touch with the son of the real owners. “We knew it was definitely identity fraud.”

But by that point, it was too late. Shaw said that the initial $70,000 payment had already gone through, and the supposed seller had disappeared.

The buyer that paid $70,000 to the fraudulent seller is still listed in municipal and county tax records as the property’s new owner — but since the original owners did not authorize the sale, it remains unclear what will happen to the land now.

“It was a real shock to find out that people were devious [enough] to do this kind of thing,” Shaw said.

‘A lot of litigation’

ABC News has learned that the FBI is now investigating the alleged scammers who fraudulently sold the lot in Randolph — though the owners of the British and Canadian homes that were used as fake addresses said they have not yet been contacted by American law enforcement authorities. The FBI would not confirm or deny details of the investigation.

Dennehy, who was previously FBI Newark’s Special Agent in Charge, is urging owners of vacant land to remain vigilant and check their property records, as the bureau has reported a 500% increase in vacant land fraud over the last four years.

“It all comes down to due diligence on behalf of the buyer, the real estate agent, the title companies and beyond,” Dennehy said, explaining that scam artists pretend to be real landowners by using publicly accessible property information.

Dennehy cited another New Jersey case in which a property owner found out that her land was fraudulently sold when the new owner showed up with construction equipment.

The FBI is encouraging real estate agents and property owners who suspect fraud to contact authorities before money changes hands.

“It’s probably going to be a whole lot of litigation for many, many months and years to come, if that money is already gone,” Dennehy said. “Technically you’re no longer the owner of the property, so now it has to get into civil lawsuits, a lot of lawyers [with] a lot of litigation involved in order to try to reclaim what’s yours to begin with.”

‘Vacant land is very easy to steal’

As a result of these scams, real estate industry groups in parts of the country with large swaths of vacant land are issuing urgent warnings to their members.

“Vacant land is very easy to steal because not everybody is going to be checking up on a vacant piece of property once a month,” Emily Bowden, executive officer of the Sussex County Association of REALTORS in New Jersey, told ABC News. “Not everyone who owns that land necessarily lives in our area.”

Bowden said real estate agents should try to meet with sellers in person whenever possible, make sure that their mailing addresses line up, and assess how well sellers actually know the lay of the land that they are seeking to put on the market.

A desire to sell a vacant lot as quickly as possible can be suspicious, Bowden said, adding that real estate agents who do not do their due diligence when representing fraudulent sellers could face lawsuits.

Derek Doernbach, who sells properties on the Jersey Shore, says he was contacted by three purported sellers who he believes were actually scammers. He said that, as a result of his suspicions, he declined to list any of the three properties.

According to Doernbach, all of the supposed sellers sent him Canadian driver’s licenses containing the exact same picture and address as the license that was presented to Shaw by the alleged scammer in the Randolph case.

“Without a doubt, this has to be the same people, or it’s just a ring on the dark web that is circulating the same driver’s license around,” Doernbach said.

A year after she was first contacted by the alleged Randolph scammer, Shaw says she wants to make sure other real estate agents remain on the lookout.

“If you have a piece of property that someone wants to sell and it’s vacant property, really, really get your feelers up on that one because there could be a potential fraud,” she said. “It’s a very easy way that they’re doing this, and it’s successful. And nobody knows until after the fact.”

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(NEW YORK) — President-elect Donald Trump sharply criticized the rising price of groceries throughout his campaign, even delivering an address outside his New Jersey home in August alongside a table covered with cereal boxes, coffee grounds and ketchup.

A wave of consumer discontent appears to have helped lift him back into the Oval Office, but Trump now faces the task of how to ease voters’ frustration.

Food inflation soared to a peak of more than 10% in 2022, but price increases have slowed to about 2%, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows.

Still, the yearslong bout of rapid inflation has sent food prices soaring more than 25% since President Joe Biden took office.

Typically, prices do not fall across the board unless the economy slows or even tips into recession, which would reduce consumer demand but also impose economic hardship, some economists told ABC News.

Still, Trump could enact policies that may slow the rise of grocery prices, or even lower the cost of some household staples, economists added.

“Prices on different items absolutely could come down,” Michael Faulkender, a professor of finance at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, told ABC News.

In response to ABC News’ request for comment, the Trump transition team said in a statement that Trump intends to fulfill the commitments he made during the campaign. But the transition team did not specifically address the issue of grocery prices.

“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the transition team, told ABC News.

Increase oil production

On the campaign trail, Trump often responded to concern about prices with a three-word mantra: “Drill, baby, drill.”

Trump, who has downplayed human-caused climate change, vowed to bolster the oil and gas industry by easing regulation and expanding output.

In theory, increased oil production could lower food prices since gas makes up a key source of costs throughout the supply chain, whether a firm is growing crops or transporting them to a seller, economists said.

“Energy is a big input cost for food,” David Andolfatto, an economist at the University of Miami, told ABC News. “That should put downward pressure on food prices.”

While such a move could prove beneficial, increased oil output under President Joe Biden coincided with the surge of inflation in recent years. Since oil is sold on a global market, a surge in domestic production may not lower prices for U.S. consumers as much as some may expect.

The U.S. set a record for crude oil production in 2023, averaging 12.9 million barrels per day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a federal agency.

A further uptick in oil production risks accelerating the nation’s carbon emissions and worsening the impact of climate change, which would carry costs down the road, Luis Cabral, a professor of economics at New York University, told ABC News.

“We can’t simply look at the benefits,” Cabral said, acknowledging the potential for lower food prices. “There are also important costs in terms of emissions and climate change.”

Bolster antitrust enforcement

To address high food prices, the Trump administration could crack down on market concentration, a term economists use to describe the dominance of a given industry by a handful of firms, some experts said.

They pointed to the market power of large corporations as a cause of rapid price increases, saying companies use their outsized role in the market to raise prices without fear of a competitor offering a comparable product at a more affordable price.

“Whenever there are fewer players in an industry, prices tend to be higher,” Cabral said. “Supermarkets aren’t an exception.”

Grocery store profit margins surged in 2021 and rose even higher two years later, even after price increases had begun to cool, a Federal Trade Commission study in March showed.

In February, the Federal Trade Commission sued to block the merger of supermarket chains Kroger and Albertsons, which would amount to the largest supermarket merger in U.S. history. The proceedings are ongoing, and will likely stretch into the Trump administration.

Some economists cast doubt over the potential benefits of antitrust, saying the recent bout of inflation coincided with an uptick in production costs during the pandemic. “It’s hard to argue that it’s therefore some kind of profiteering,” Faulkender said.

Price-gouging ban

During the campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris proposed a federal ban on price gouging for food and groceries.

The plan could resemble price-gouging bans in place in 37 states, which prohibit a sudden spike in prices for scarce goods, the Harris campaign said. Those bans prohibit companies from exploiting a sudden imbalance between supply and demand by significantly hiking prices.

While Trump may be reluctant to adopt a policy put forward by his proponent, he could advance a price-gouging ban as a means of preventing acute price increases for specific goods.

For instance, egg prices have skyrocketed 30% over the year ending in October, U.S. Bureau of Statistics data on Wednesday showed. The spike owed primarily to an avian flu outbreak that has decimated supply. Last year, egg prices climbed more than 60% in response to a similar avian flu outbreak.

Economists who spoke to ABC News differed on the effectiveness of a potential price-gouging ban.

Some economists dismissed the policy as a flawed solution, since state-level bans usually get triggered only in the case of emergencies and, even then, often lack clarity about the type of company behavior that constitutes price-gouging.

“I don’t think a federal price-gouging ban would help at all,” Cabral said.

Andolfatto, of the University of Miami, said a price-gouging ban could lower food prices if it barred rapid price increases under some circumstances. However, those benefits may be outweighed by the downside, since such a ban could override the market signal delivered by prices, which help direct the distribution of goods to places where they are in short supply.

“These types of interventions have unintended consequences,” Andolfatto said.

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(WASHINGTON) — Social media platform TikTok is hurtling toward a U.S. ban that could upend its business and frustrate more than 150 million American users — unless President-elect Donald Trump finds a way to reverse the policy.

Trump, who boasts 14 million followers on TikTok, voiced opposition to the ban earlier this year. The policy, which orders TikTok to find a U.S. parent company or face a ban, is set to take effect on Jan. 19, a day before Trump’s inauguration.

An effort to eliminate the ban may present formidable political challenges and legal hurdles, experts told ABC News. The outcome could depend on support from an array of major institutions ranging from Congress and the Supreme Court to tech giants like Google and Oracle, they added.

The China-owned app has faced growing scrutiny from government officials over fears that user data could fall into the possession of the Chinese government and the app could be weaponized by China to spread misinformation.

There is little evidence that TikTok has shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government or that the Chinese government has asked the app to do so, cybersecurity experts previously told ABC News.

TikTok did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment. Neither did Trump’s transition team.

The president is expected to try to stop the ban of TikTok after he takes office, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with his views on the matter.

Here’s what to know about the different ways that Trump could try to stop the TikTok ban, according to experts:

Push Congress to repeal the TikTok ban

The most straightforward way to reverse the policy would be a repeal of the law that enacted the ban in the first place, experts told ABC News.

A repeal would require passage in both houses of Congress, landing the measure on Trump’s desk for his signature.

“The easiest way is to ask Congress to reverse the ban,” Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown University, told ABC News. But, he added, it isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Congress voted in favor of the ban only seven months ago. In the House of Representatives, the ban passed by an overwhelming margin of 352-65. In the Senate, 79 members voted in favor of the measure, while 18 opposed and 3 abstained.

A repeal effort carries political risks for Trump, since it could be perceived as conciliatory toward China, in contrast with the adversarial tone voiced by Trump on the campaign trail, James Lewis, a data security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told ABC News.

“It’s a political problem,” Lewis said, noting that Trump could soften potential backlash by seeking a reform of the law rather than an outright repeal.

Trump may not need Congress to repeal the ban. A lawsuit against the ban brought by TikTok on First Amendment grounds currently stands before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Experts who spoke to ABC News said they expect the court to rule against TikTok, but the company could then appeal, potentially sending the case to the Supreme Court before the ban takes effect. The Supreme Court may determine that the legal challenge holds sufficient merit to delay implementation of the ban, leading ultimately to a rejection of the law.

“The Supreme Court may want a crack at this,” Alan Rozenshtein, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who focuses on the First Amendment, told ABC News.

Refuse to enforce the TikTok ban

Instead of repealing the law or counting on court intervention, Trump could try to prevent the Justice Department from enforcing the measure, experts said.

The law orders distributors like Apple and Google to stop offering the social media platform in their app stores, and it requires cloud service providers like Oracle to withhold the infrastructure necessary for TikTok to operate.

Companies that violate the law risk a penalty of $5,000 for each user who accesses TikTok. “That adds up,” Rozenshtein said.

In theory, Trump’s Justice Department could opt against enforcement of the law, reassuring the likes of Apple and Oracle that the companies would not face prosecution in the event of a violation, experts said.

Along similar lines, the Trump administration could take up an interpretation of the ban that affords it wide latitude in finding that TikTok has complied with a requirement that it divest from parent company ByteDance, experts said.

In other words, even if TikTok has made little effort to comply with the law, the Trump administration could attempt a reading of the measure that finds the company has met the threshold necessary to avoid a ban, Rozenshtein said.

If Trump opts against enforcement, the move could still prove insufficient. Companies like Apple and Oracle may decide to comply with the ban anyway, since they could face legal risk if the Trump administration reverses its approach, Rozenshtein added.

“Trump is mercurial,” Rozenshtein said. “If you are Apple’s general counsel, do you really want this hanging over you?”

Help TikTok find a U.S. buyer

Finally, Trump could try to find a U.S. buyer for TikTok, allowing the platform to avoid a ban. This approach may appeal to Trump’s self-image as a business dealmaker, but time is running short for such a significant business transaction and TikTok has shown little appetite for it, experts said.

The law allows for a 90-day extension of the deadline for a TikTok sale, as long as the company is advancing toward an agreement. Under such a scenario, the deadline would move back to April, providing Trump with additional time.

“It’s possible that he’ll try to force TikTok to come to some kind of deal with American buyers,” Lewis said. “It’s not likely. TikTok will hold out as long as they can.”

China has signaled opposition to the sale of TikTok to a U.S. company, The Wall Street Journal reported in March.

Alternatively, Trump could seek a compromise measure in Congress that affords him additional time and wider latitude to establish a U.S.-based operation for TikTok, experts said. Or the Trump administration could offer up an interpretation of the law that gives it space to strike a compromise with TikTok.

TikTok previously proposed a solution called “Project Texas,” in which the company would keep all data on U.S. users within the country through a partnership with Oracle. When TikTok CEO Shou Chew testified before Congress last year, several members raised concern about a potential lack of third-party oversight in such an arrangement.

Trump could seek to assuage the concerns of members of Congress while reaching terms satisfactory to TikTok, Chander said.

“Trump may be able to do things that reassure the American people that the app is safe, and that it is bringing a lot of the programming here to U.S. soil,” Chander said.

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