地面師

An organised group that impersonates a property's registered owner in order to sell land or a building it does not own. The word is colloquial rather than statutory: what gets charged is fraud, which carries a custodial sentence of up to ten years[1], together with procuring a false entry in an official record, which covers persuading a registrar to record a transfer that never lawfully happened and carries up to five years or a fine of up to ¥500,000[1]. Schemes concentrate on property whose real owner a buyer cannot easily reach and cross-check: vacant land, a long-unoccupied building, or a parcel still registered to someone elderly, overseas, or dead without the inheritance ever being registered. Each turns on presenting the documents the registry asks for, whether forged, stolen, or genuinely issued on the strength of a false identity such as a notarization obtained with a forged passport. Matching those documents against the registration record is the baseline check and not the defence: an impersonator presenting the real owner's name and address matches the record exactly, and the record cannot say who is standing in the room. What catches the fraud is cross-checking several independent facts at once, with a 司法書士 doing the identity work, and treating a seller who cannot produce their 登記識別情報 as a reason to slow down.