Man accused of trying to steal Halle Berry's Los Angeles house

In possibly one of the odder celebrity home-related stories to circulate, a man has allegedly tried to steal a Los Angeles house belonging to Oscar-winning actor Halle Berry.

According to gossip site TMZ, the ill-fated venture started at least as far back as January this year when, allegedly, an eagle-eyed gardener noted the man in question trying to fiddle with some of the locks at the property.

Other employees then allegedly saw him in again March, this time with a locksmith. The man, said to be 49-year-old Ronald Eugene Griffin, claimed he was the new owner of the home.

Mr Griffin is alleged to have created a fake deed of title for the home, which he presented to the police who had been notified, and insisted that it was, indeed, his house.

He was later charged with petty theft, and a “felony count of procuring and offering a false warranty deed”.

Apparently he was unaware that the home belonged to Berry, who recently appeared in the latest instalment of the successful John Wick franchise with Keanu Reeves.

The suggestion of “stealing a home” might conjure up a clandestine mission involving backing a really big truck up a driveway, but unfortunately there have been other, more successful attempts to acquire homes by forging the deeds.

In a recent case in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, three men allegedly managed to steal 21 homes using forged documentation between April 2017 and June 2018, before fleeing the country.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the men had targeted gentrifying suburbs, with 13 of the properties already resold or “flipped”, and the owners of most of the properties selected were deceased.

An investigation by NBC10 published in February found that there had been a significant jump in the number of people in the city claiming have suffered title deed fraud over the past year, with poorer communities and the elderly particularly targeted.

Other cases of deed fraud have been reported recently in Texas, New York City and Florida.