Even though the SIM was part of the car they bought, the SIM's contract is not in their name which means using the contract would be theft.
I bought an aparment 3.5 years ago and it had an alarm installed.
I called the security company to transfer ownership but that couldn’t be done without authorisation from the previous owner, which probably makes sense. The problem is, they were unreachable, and I was living on a house that I now owned, and which had cameras the previous owner could take pics from at any time.
My patience was running out so I threatened the security company with removing the cameras installed in the house I owned, but I was told that they owned them even if they were inside my house.
The last time I checked, US property rights made it clear that you cannot just store stuff on other people’s land without permission, and then complain when they throw it away.
They could try to argue that whatever contract the previous owner signed still applies, but for that to be the case, they would have had to amend the deed to the property, and that should have been noticed by your title agency.
Why waste your own time with this? If it's your house, you own everything inside. I would put all the cameras in the trash and forget about it.
25 years passed. My mother started variously selling and disposing of their slowly rotting crap that they evidently were never going to collect, as she wanted to fix the structural issues with the barn, and their stuff was in the way, as it literally filled the entire ground floor.
And then, one day, 30 years later, their children showed up, wanting to collect their inheritance.
They sued. They won. She had to fork over about €100k.
So no, just because you own the house, you don’t own everything in it.
In Europe, it’s also common for you to buy a place, and then when you move in, you find the vendor has taken all of the wiring and plumbing with them. Sometimes they’ll even take things like doors, staircases, floors, you name it.
You can't just lump 27 countries with wildly differing laws together like this.
You have to ensure the contract of sale specifically includes things like wiring, the boiler, the radiators, flooring, light fittings and switches, because if they aren’t explicitly included, they aren’t included. There are some very odd definitions of chattels vs fixtures out there - in France, it has to be nailed to the structure to count as a fixture. If it’s screwed, glued, or otherwise not nailed down, it’s a chattel.
This is the first time I hwar of this.
At least in Norway the rule is that everything that is built in stays.
So table, chairs, TV, washing machine, dryer etc goes, but built in appliances and built in place furniture stays.
Does England count as Europe?
Abandoned property is just that.
She was actually lucky to avoid criminal charges.
Abandonment should be measured at the takeover of property in lieu of agreement, and a reasonable time frame for pickup agreement is on the order of days, not years.
At that point just lie and say that it never happened.
Or that the preperty was just some dishes or something.
The owner died in the early 90s - the folks who rocked up were the grandchildren of her ex-husband.
As for people who have said “oh she should have charged for the storage” - that would have been nice, but that wasn’t the agreement, and French law treats a verbal agreement as a contract, and also places the onus in this type of situation on the person holding the goods to make extensive efforts to contact the owner and/or their heirs.
There was recently a case in the press where person sold “old junk” to an antique dealer. Antique dealer sells it at auction for fortune. Antique dealer is then forced to hand over full sum to person who sold old junk/priceless antique.
Squatters rights are incredible. A friend had their house occupied one winter while they were away, 16 years ago. The squatters had a baby. They are only legally allowed to remove them this year, when the child turns 18.
The napoleonic code. This is why France is full of abandoned properties, stuck in probate for all eternity, as finding and getting hundreds of heirs to unanimously agree on a sale or whatever is… hard.
True, but the thing with verbal agreements is that it's very difficult to prove what was agreed upon.
Your mother should have just lied.
LOL!
No. This is not common at all.
I've seen it from disgruntled former renters, but that's it.
It's also illegal.
And before I get called naive, courts do look very favorably upon defendants that are nice.
I simply covered them. The threat was just me running out of patience.
What the actual fuck?! Why would you have cameras inside your house to begin with, let alone ones that upload to “the cloud” and let alone ones that upload to users you don’t control?
I’m totally shocked by this.
No, that's how ownership of internet accounts works. Ownership of real estate is based on completely different principles; there is no earthly reason you'd need the previous owner to be involved. Who owns what real estate is a matter of public record.
Doesn't mean they need to be kept in their current location though. You're entirely within your rights to remove them and leave them in a safe place for them to retrieve at their leisure.
The company on the contract voluntarily gave the SIM to OP.
I may even consider filing against the previous tenants for not removing them and so my being filmed destroying them was without my consent, it’s a clear crime to me to record someone on their private property without their permission ..
This is absolutely not normal anywhere.