How a Paris Owner Reversed a Forged Sale of Her Netanya Apartment

Result: A fraudulent transfer of a Netanya apartment cancelled and the property restored to its true owner · Timeline: 8 days to injunction, 11 months to cancelled registration · Challenge: A forged notarial power of attorney with a genuine-looking apostille · Authority: Central District Court, Land Registry (Tabu), Israel Police fraud unit · Financial Impact: NIS 3,450,000 apartment preserved

Background

She found out from a neighbour. A retired schoolteacher in the 19th arrondissement of Paris had owned a three-room apartment near the Netanya seafront since 2008, when her parents' estate was wound up and the property was registered in her sole name. She visited most summers. She rented it out through a local agency the rest of the year, collected the rent into an Israeli account, and paid the arnona and the va'ad bayit by standing order.

In April 2026 the neighbour in the flat below telephoned to ask who the men measuring the balcony were. Nobody was supposed to be measuring anything. The tenants had left in February and the agency had not yet found new ones.

She asked her son to pull a Land Registry extract online. The extract showed the apartment registered to a man she had never heard of, transferred on 12 March 2026, on the strength of an irrevocable notarial power of attorney apparently signed by her in Paris eleven months earlier. She had signed no such thing. She had not been in a notary's office in twenty years.

The Challenge

Israeli land fraud against absentee owners follows a pattern, and the pattern exists because the incentives are perfect. The target is a property registered to someone who lives abroad, visits rarely, has no mortgage on the file, and is unlikely to look at the register from one year to the next. The instrument is almost always a power of attorney rather than a forged signature on a transfer deed, because the Land Registry expects a notarial power of attorney when an owner cannot attend, and a document from abroad carrying an apostille looks exactly as it should.

The legal problem for the true owner is that Israeli registration is not merely a record. Section 125(a) of the Land Law 1969 makes registration in the Rights Register conclusive evidence of its contents for settled land, and Section 10 protects a person who acquires a right in registered land for value, in good faith, relying on what the register said. Israeli courts have refused to let Section 10 launder a chain that begins in forgery when the person invoking it was part of the scheme. The danger is the next link. Once the fraudster's transferee sells on, or mortgages the apartment to a bank, there is a genuinely innocent purchaser or lender in the picture, and the true owner's position changes from recovering the apartment to suing a person who has left the country.

That is why these cases are won or lost in the first fortnight and not at trial.

The other rulebook here is the Land Rights Settlement Ordinance [New Version] 5729-1969. Section 93 lets the court order the register corrected where a registration was obtained by fraud, and Section 94 gives a right to compensation where correction is no longer possible. Read those two together and the strategy writes itself: get to Section 93 before the facts push you into Section 94.

In Practice: Under Section 93 of the Land Rights Settlement Ordinance [New Version] 5729-1969, the District Court may order the Land Registry to correct a registration obtained by fraud, but not against a person who acquired the land in good faith and for consideration from a registered owner after settlement. An urgent application for a temporary injunction in the Central District Court, supported by an affidavit and an undertaking as to damages, is heard within days rather than weeks; ours was granted 8 days after the fraud was discovered, against a court guarantee of NIS 40,000. The apartment was valued at NIS 3,450,000.

What We Did

We filed before we finished investigating, which is not how anyone likes to work and is the right call every time.

Within a week of the first telephone call we applied to the Central District Court for a temporary injunction restraining the registered holder from selling, mortgaging, or otherwise dealing with the apartment, and registered a note of the pending proceedings against the file so that no purchaser could later claim to have relied on a clean register. The application went in on affidavit evidence from Paris, sworn before the Israeli consular officer, because there was no time to courier documents and no reason to wait. The injunction was granted eight days after she learned of the transfer. As it turned out, a sale agreement had already been signed and the deposit paid.

Then we took the forged power of attorney apart.

The document named a Paris notaire and carried an apostille. France changed how apostilles are issued on 1 May 2025, moving the function from the cours d'appel to notaries, and one practical consequence is that a French apostille can now be traced through the issuing notary's records. The apostille number on this document did not correspond to anything. The notaire named on the power of attorney had no such act in his register, and confirmed as much in writing within three weeks of our enquiry.

The identity evidence was worse for the fraudsters than the apostille. The power of attorney recorded a French passport number that had expired in 2019. Our client's entry and exit records, obtained from the Israeli Population and Immigration Authority, showed she had not been in Israel at any point in the relevant year, and her employer's records placed her in a Paris classroom on the day the document said she was signing.

We filed a criminal complaint with the Israel Police fraud investigation unit, and her French lawyer filed a plainte with the procureur de la République in Paris over the misuse of a French notaire's identity. Neither criminal file recovered a shekel. Both mattered, because a defendant facing a police file negotiates differently from one facing only a civil claim.

The purchaser under the aborted sale agreement, who appears to have been genuinely innocent, joined the proceedings to protect his deposit. His position and ours were aligned once the forgery was documented, and his lawyer's evidence about how the transaction had been presented to him helped us more than it helped the man who had taken the money.

In Practice: The Land Registry (Tabu) cannot cancel a completed registration on an owner's complaint, however obvious the forgery; correction requires a court judgment or the registered holder's consent. What the Ministry of Justice does offer, at no cost, is a registration-alert service that notifies an owner by email or SMS when any dealing is filed against their property. Registering for it takes minutes and would have given this owner warning in March instead of a neighbour's telephone call in April. For non-resident owners it is the single cheapest protection available, and almost nobody abroad knows it exists.

The Outcome

Judgment came eleven months after the injunction. The registered holder never produced an original of the power of attorney, never explained the passport number, and stopped attending after the second hearing. The court found the instrument forged, held that the transfer was void rather than voidable, and ordered the register corrected under Section 93 so that the apartment stood again in our client's sole name. Costs of NIS 65,000 were awarded against the defendant and, predictably, have not been paid.

The apartment was back in her name with the injunction discharged and the note deleted. She had lost eleven months of rent and paid legal fees, and she had kept an asset worth NIS 3,450,000 that she came within a signature or two of losing outright. Had the sale completed and the buyer registered before we filed, the case would have moved from Section 93 to Section 94, and Section 94 is a claim for money against people who are very good at not having any.

She has since registered for the Land Registry alert service, and we placed a caution note on the file in favour of her son. Neither step costs much. Both make the apartment a far less attractive target than it was.

Key Takeaways

What this case illustrates for non-residents in similar situations:

1. Register for the Ministry of Justice land registration alert service the day you acquire Israeli property. It is free, it takes minutes, and it converts the discovery of a fraudulent dealing from months into hours.
2. Speed beats completeness. Apply for an injunction and register a note of pending proceedings on the evidence you have, not the evidence you would like. Section 93 of the Land Rights Settlement Ordinance stops protecting you the moment a good-faith purchaser for value registers.
3. A foreign power of attorney is only as good as its underlying act, and that act can be checked. Since 1 May 2025 French apostilles are issued by notaries and traceable through their records, so a false apostille number is provable rather than merely suspicious.
4. Pull a Land Registry extract on your Israeli property once a year. It costs a few shekels online and it is the only routine check that catches this category of fraud early.
5. File the criminal complaint even though it will not recover money. A defendant facing a police fraud file behaves very differently in the civil proceedings, and the investigation produces documents a civil litigant cannot obtain.

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Facing a Similar Situation?

If you own Israeli property from abroad and something on the register looks wrong, or a neighbour tells you strangers have been in the apartment, the first fortnight decides what remedy is still available to you. Before that, a routine annual check of the register and the steps described in our guide to selling Israeli property as a non-resident will tell you whether your file is exposed.

Contact us for a confidential consultation about your Israeli legal matter.