This page names no cases and no companies. It describes patterns, the documents that expose each one before money moves, and what the law actually provides once money has already moved.
Start with the structural fact that makes most of these patterns possible, because almost every one of them is a variation on it: in Montenegro, paying for a property and owning it are two different events, separated by time. Everything below lives in that gap.
Why the register, not the contract, decides who owns it
Article 88 of the Law on Property Rights Relations governs what happens when the same immovable has been sold to more than one person. Its hierarchy is worth reading slowly:
Where several people have concluded transactions to acquire the same immovable, ownership is acquired by the person who registered their right in the cadastre, if they were in good faith. Where none has registered, ownership goes to the person who obtained possession. And where none has either registered or taken possession, ownership goes to the one who concluded the transaction earlier, provided they acted in good faith.
Read what that means for a buyer. Being first to sign does not win. Being first to pay does not win. Being first to register in good faith wins. A seller who takes your money and then sells and registers the same apartment to someone else has not merely breached a contract — under Article 88 they may have transferred ownership away from you, and your claim becomes a claim for money against a person who has your money.
This is why the interval between signature and registration is not administrative housekeeping. It is the entire exposure.
The patterns
The double sale. The engine described above, run deliberately. The tell is almost always urgency plus a reason to delay registration — a "notary appointment next month", a request to sign now and complete formalities later, a discount conditioned on speed.
The seller who is not the owner. Sometimes the person selling is a co-owner presenting themselves as the owner; sometimes the chain of title has a gap; sometimes an heir is selling an estate that has never been through probate. The folio shows this, and only the folio does — the sheets and annotations are explained in our title deed guide.
The building that cannot lawfully be sold. A structure built without a permit, or beyond one, or never registered. This is not an exotic risk on the coast, and the consequences run to a prohibition on disposal rather than a fine. What the permit position actually means for a buyer is set out in our use permit guide.
The power of attorney that does too much. Either forged, or genuine but drafted so broadly that the holder can do things the grantor never intended — including selling. Foreign buyers are exposed at both ends here: they grant broad powers to save a trip, and they accept a seller's representative's authority without reading it. The form and scope rules are in our power of attorney guide.
The deposit taken by someone with nothing to sell. Money paid as a reservation or deposit to a party who cannot deliver — because they do not own it, cannot register it, or never intended to. What a deposit legally is, and what it does when the deal fails, is covered in our deposit rules guide.
Off-plan with no security. Instalments against a building that does not exist yet, with no mechanism tying payment to progress or protecting the money if the developer fails — the subject of our off-plan guide.
| Pattern | What you would see | The document that exposes it |
|---|---|---|
| Double sale | Pressure to sign fast; registration postponed | Current folio pulled on the day of signing, and again before payment |
| Seller is not the owner | Names on the contract not matching the register | Property folio, sheet by sheet |
| Unpermitted building | "Legalisation in progress"; no use permit produced | Building and use permit numbers, checked against the register |
| Abusive power of attorney | Signing by a representative; original never shown | The instrument itself: scope, date, certification chain |
| Deposit to a non-seller | Payment demanded before any title check | Folio plus proof of the recipient's capacity to sell |
| Off-plan without security | Instalments tied to dates rather than milestones | The payment schedule and whatever secures it |
If it has already happened: the first week
Order matters more than volume here. Three things run in parallel, and one of them is time-critical.
Annotate the dispute on the folio. This is the step foreign clients most often learn about too late. Under Article 98 of the Law on State Survey and Real Property Cadastre, a zabilježba records facts relating to the property — expressly including the initiation of a dispute to determine rights over immovables, or to delete a registration that has been made. Filing the claim and getting that annotation onto the folio does something Article 88 makes decisive: it puts the dispute on the public record, and a later buyer who registers with that annotation visible is not acting in good faith. In a system where good faith is the qualifier on the winning position, destroying a future registrant's good faith is not a formality — it is the protection.
File the criminal complaint. Article 244 of the Criminal Code punishes fraud: obtaining unlawful property gain by deceiving someone through false representation or concealment of facts, or keeping them in error, and thereby inducing them to act to their own or another's detriment. The offence is graded by amount — the higher bands engage once the gain or loss exceeds €3,000 and again above €30,000, thresholds a property case clears without argument. The complaint goes to the prosecutor, and the file you hand over matters more than the language you use in it.
Preserve the evidence before it is tidied away. Contracts and drafts in the versions you actually received, the full message history including the ones that felt unimportant, bank confirmations showing what left your account and where it went, the listing as it was published, and a folio extract dated as close to the events as you can get. Screenshots of listings disappear when a page is edited; pull them now.
Good faith is the battleground, so understand what it is
Because Article 88 hands the property to a registrant in good faith, most serious disputes turn into an argument about what the other side knew and when. It is worth knowing how that argument is actually run, because it shapes what you should be collecting from day one.
Good faith here is not a claim about someone's character. It is a factual question about knowledge: did the competing acquirer know, or in the circumstances have reason to know, that someone else had already acquired a right to the same property? What tends to answer it is documentary and behavioural — what the register showed on the day they registered, whether an annotation was already there, whether the price was so far below market that it invites the question, whether the same intermediary stood on both sides, how quickly the second transaction followed the first, and what correspondence exists between the seller and the second buyer.
Two practical consequences follow. The first is the annotation point above: it converts an evidential argument into a documentary one, because after the annotation nobody can credibly say the register looked clean. The second is that your own conduct is also evidence — a buyer who took possession, insured the property, paid the utilities and pressed for registration is in a materially stronger position than one who paid and waited quietly, even though both were equally defrauded.
What criminal and civil routes each actually deliver
Foreign clients frequently expect a criminal complaint to give the apartment back. It does not. A prosecution punishes the person; it does not, by itself, restore title or return the money. Its real value in a property case is different and still substantial: it creates an official record, it brings investigative powers to bear on documents and accounts that a private claimant cannot reach, and it changes the incentives of a counterparty who was relying on your distance and your unfamiliarity.
The civil claim is what restores the position — annulment, a declaration of ownership, deletion of a wrongful registration, damages — and it is the one that carries the annotation onto the register. Where money has already moved onward, recovery becomes an enforcement problem, which is the work of our enforcement and insolvency practice; the criminal side sits with our criminal law practice.
Run them together, but be clear which one is going to end with your name on the folio.
The uncomfortable pattern behind the patterns
Almost none of these schemes require sophistication. They require a buyer who is not physically present, who cannot read the documents, who has been introduced to everyone in the transaction by one person, and who feels a deadline. Remove any one of those four and most of them stop working.
That is also why the choice of who acts for you is a fraud-prevention question rather than a service question — and why the conflict rules matter. Our guide to engaging a lawyer in Montenegro sets out how to verify counsel and why a lawyer recommended by the other side is a structural problem rather than a convenience. The Turkish counterpart to this page, for readers whose exposure is there, is our note on property fraud in Turkey.
If you think it is happening now
Send us the contract, the folio and the payment record today rather than after the next instalment. If the position is recoverable, it is recoverable fastest in the first days, and the annotation on the register is the step that stops the situation getting worse while everything else is assessed. If it turns out nothing is wrong, you have lost an afternoon.
