Kind of an apples to oranges comparison. You're talking about insurance
fraud and the like, I expect, which is a wholly different ballgame.
Yeah, but if he lives (eg, spends most of his time at the house in the red town) he's technically not a resident of the green town he left anymore, at
least by some standards.
Again, of course, it depends how we qualify what it means to be a resident
of a given town/city.
Of course, there's the usual debate- "whose to know? does it matter?" There's lots of gray at play, as well. There's all this business about intent, and so on.. .but frankly, if someone jumps through 20 hoops to change their residency, how is the state going to "disagree" with that, even if the whole thing is intentional subterfuge?
Here's one example. We'll take a guy, he lives in Worcester. His girlfriend lives in a green town, called Businblah. Guy says "hey I'll just claim I'm a resident of Businblah, as I spend most of my time at the GF's house anyways" and then changes his DL, bills, voter registration, etc, to reflect his residence in Businblah. If someone challenges the guy, what real proof are they going to come up with that the guy is NOT a resident of
Businblah?
Obviously, this is NOT the case as outlined by the OP, but it might be in a
similar case.
IMO the problems are more likely to be practical than legal. I'm not sure what you mean by something "going wrong." A person either meets the requirements for residency in a given locale or they don't, at least in practical terms. In legal terms, it could be a completely different ballgame, though. If you do a search on "residency" in the NES search engine, you'll probably find one of those threads I was referring to- in which case you'll probably get more confused, because legally speaking, you can have situations where someone is, on paper, by most normal people's accounts, a resident of "town A" but after much legal discourse, is really considered, by the terms/standards of law/case law, to -really- be a resident of "town b".
Of course this begs the question, could a guy get in trouble for having such a scheme? I'll qualify that with a "maybe". I've never heard of someone running into such trouble, then again most I know who change residency are doing it in a "clean enough" way so that it would never be an issue anyways. Hell, walking down the street in MA might be legally perilous, too. If he thinks his scenario might be legally perilous, he should
talk to a real lawyer.
-Mike