tagged w/ foreclosure fraud
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California Homeowners need to have fair District courts that will read the complaints and insist that defendants respond to them before dismissing cases based on the Big Banks request!California Homeowners need to have fair District courts that will read the complaints... more
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Courts won't give homeowners their day in court and instead protect the big banks and Wall Street. Banks just as for case to be dismissed and the courts grant their wishes without insisting that the banks respond to the complaint. Where and when did America leave us?Courts won't give homeowners their day in court and instead protect the big banks... more
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The law firm of Steven J. Baum in Buffalo, New York, held a homeless themed Halloween party last year and a former employee decided to “leak” the pictures this weekend. The firm represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. What horrible people. The epitome of heartlessness.The law firm of Steven J. Baum in Buffalo, New York, held a homeless themed Halloween... more
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Bank of America has little patience for homeowners who have fallen on hard times and behind on their mortgages. The lending giant is in the midst of foreclosure battles in every state as well as defending against allegations that they engaged in fraud and misrepresentation during the foreclosure process.
Given all the increased scrutiny you would think the bank would be extra diligent before pursuing homeowners in court. Think again.
First the mega-bank wrongfully foreclosed on a couple who had paid cash for their house (and thus not only did not have a mortgage with Bank of America but owned title to their property free and clear). Then, when the couple fought the mistaken foreclosure, Bank of America refused to back down, insisting they owned the home.
When Bank of America lost the foreclosure action they were ordered to pay the couple's attorney and court fees, since it was Bank of America's error that brought the action in the first place.
Instead of paying those fees promptly, Bank of America let the bill sit for over five months. Tired of banks getting away with actions that can throw an average citizen in jail these days, the couple and their attorney had a stroke of genius. They foreclosed upon the bank.
The action got the attention of the bank. After an hour of being locked out by bailiffs while their furniture, computers, and cash in the till was seized, the branch manager was able to get the couple and their attorney a check for the fees owed.
The actions of Bank of America says everything about the attitude permeating lending institutions in this country. They abuse customers and non-customers without so much as a second thought and ignore the rule of law at will. And while the "little guy" turned the tables here, you have to wonder just how many more stories like this are out there, only the homeowners were too scared, confused or just plain beat down to fight back.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBuCSTFJffY
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/bank-of-america-gets-foreclosed-on/239951/Bank of America has little patience for homeowners who have fallen on hard times and... more
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The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
READ MORE: http://globalpoliticalawakening.blogspot.com/2010/11/matt-taibbi-courts-helping-banks-screw.htmlThe foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They... more
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For two years, politicians have danced around the nationalization issue, but ForeclosureGate may be the last straw. The megabanks are too big to fail, but they aren’t too big to reorganize as federal institutions serving the public interest.
In January 2009, only a week into Obama’s presidency, David Sanger reported in The New York Times that nationalizing the banks was being discussed. Privately, the Obama economic team was conceding that more taxpayer money was going to be needed to shore up the banks. When asked whether nationalization was a good idea, House speaker Nancy Pelosi replied:
“Well, whatever you want to call it . . . . If we are strengthening them, then the American people should get some of the upside of that strengthening. Some people call that nationalization.
“I’m not talking about total ownership,” she quickly cautioned — stopping herself by posing a question: “Would we have ever thought we would see the day when we’d be using that terminology? ‘Nationalization of the banks?’ ”
Read More: http://globalpoliticalawakening.blogspot.com/2010/11/foreclosuregate-could-force-bank.htmlFor two years, politicians have danced around the nationalization issue, but... more
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Wells Fargo Repossesses A Fully Paid Off Car (VIDEO)
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The foreclosure fraud crisis seems to escalate with each passing now. It is being reported that all 50 U.S. states have launched a joint investigation into alleged fraud in the mortgage industry. This is a huge story that is not going to go away any time soon. The truth is that it would be hard to understate the amount of fraud that has gone on in the U.S. mortgage industry, and we are watching events unfold that could potentially rip the U.S. economy to shreds. Many are now referring to this crisis as "Foreclosure-Gate", and already it is shaping up to be the worst thing that has ever happened to the U.S. mortgage industry. At this point, it seems inevitable that some financial institutions will go under as a result of this mess. In fact, by the end of this thing we might see a whole bunch of lending institutions crash and burn. This crisis is very hard to describe because it is just so darn complicated, but it is worth it to try to dig into this thing and understand what is going on because it has the potential to absolutely decimate the entire U.S. mortgage industry.The foreclosure fraud crisis seems to escalate with each passing now. It is being... more
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by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
A massive foreclosure fraud scandal is rocking the U.S. mortgage market. Wall Street banks and their lawyers are fabricating documents, forging signatures and lying to judges—all to exploit troubled borrowers with enormous, illegal fees, and in some cases, improperly foreclose on borrowers who haven’t missed any payments.
The fraud is so widespread that it could put some big banks out of business and even spark another financial collapse. Fortunately, things haven’t fallen apart just yet. With strong leadership from President Barack Obama and Congress, the government can help keep troubled borrowers in their homes and prevent another meltdown.
One fraud begets another
As Danny Schecter emphasizes in an interview with GRITtv’s Laura Flanders, this mess is just one element of a broader, criminal fraud at the heart of the foreclosure fiasco and resulting financial crisis. Banks pushed fraudulent loans onto borrowers during the housing bubble because the loans could be packaged into mortgage-backed securitizations and pawned off on hedge funds and other banks. Banks made a lot of money from this process, until the mortgages went bad and the fraud-packed securities plummeted in value.
Document drama
At the heart of any mortgage is a document called “The Note”, which lays out the terms of the mortgage and the kinds of fees that banks can levy against borrowers if they fall behind on their payments. Owning the note also gives banks the right to foreclose when a borrower stops paying.
The trouble is, in an effort to cut costs and boost bonuses, banks haven’t kept actually kept track of the note—in fact, they’ve actively destroyed the document so they don’t have to deal with filing it. Now that mortgages are going bad, banks are taking advantage of the documentation vacuum they created to levy massive, illegal fees on borrowers both before and during the foreclosure process. They do this by manufacturing fake documents, forging signatures, and getting bogus signatures from notaries to approve sham documents.
This is all terribly unfair to borrowers. In some cases, illegal fees push borrowers over the edge into foreclosure, while in others, borrowers get saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in illegal fees after getting kicked out of their home. The situation is a national disgrace.
Failure to produce
But the situation also creates legal liabilities that can push banks into failure. If banks can’t pony up the note, they don’t have the right to foreclose—not without some serious, expensive legal maneuvering. And what’s more, if the banks who created these shoddy securities can’t supply notes, investors who bought the securities can force losses back on the banks that created them. Given that there are $2.6 trillion in mortgage-backed securities out there, banks are very worried that losses and lawsuits stemming from shoddy documentation could spark another round of major financial turmoil.
The sheer lack of documentation makes it very difficult for investors to decipher which banks are exposed to loads of red ink, and which banks are not. That’s a recipe for financial panic.
Silencing employees
The banks know they’re in serious trouble. That’s why, as Andy Kroll notes for Mother Jones, mortgage servicers like GMAC are trying to silence employees who can testify about the extent of these frauds. GMAC employee Jeffrey Stephan confessed to robo-signing 10,000 foreclosure documents every month without actually examining them. His acknowledgment sparked the current public scrutiny of foreclosure fraud, which has expanded to banks including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America.
Kroll was one of the first to report on these fraudulent foreclosure mills and their illegal fees, and his coverage of the issue is essential reading for anybody following the unfolding crisis. Kroll also highlights the wave of new investigations and inquiries being launched by attorneys general in eight states, a phenomenon that is likely to expand as the crisis widens.
As Annie Lowrey details for The Washington Independent, one of those states is Ohio, where Attorney General Richard Cordray is suing GMAC, seeking $25,000 in damages for every fraudulent document the company has filed. In Ohio alone, there have been 190,000 foreclosures over the past two years. Cordray hasn’t won his suit, and not every foreclosure will include fraud, but that’s a potential loss of over $7 billion to GMAC from foreclosures in Ohio alone over the past two years. And that doesn’t include what would be much higher losses to banks who packaged the mortgage securities, who are forced to repurchase them by burned investors.
Banks are doing their best to minimize the appearance of scandal, but the scope of potential losses from outright fraud is quite clearly a threat to the viability of the financial system. It’s easy to imagine a disaster scenario in which the government has no choice but to take major action to prevent the economy from imploding (yes, it can actually get worse).
Obama needs to pick up the slack
So far, President Obama is sending mixed signals about his intentions. As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, Obama vetoed a bill that would have made it harder for borrowers to show that banks were engaging in fraud during the foreclosure process. That was on Friday—but by Sunday, top Obama adviser David Axelrod was telling the press that the administration was not ready to support a foreclosure moratorium, dismissing the fraud crisis as a set of “mistakes” with lender “paperwork.”
As I note for AlterNet, Axelrod’s comments are a complete mischaracterization of what’s going on in the foreclosure process, and of what can be done. The housing market is a mess because banks have been systematically committing fraud. We cannot rely on such fraudsters to fix the mess– some kind of government action is going to be necessary. Whatever the solution, the administration cannot stand with big Wall Street banks against the borrowers and investors that are being defrauded. Any solution must take the interest of troubled borrowers as paramount. We’ve already tried saving the banks without saving homeowners, and as the unfolding foreclosure fraud crisis illustrates, it didn’t work.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger
A massive foreclosure fraud scandal is... more
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Watch Bear Stearns' EMC Mortgage lie in this video. EMC later testified during a 2004 trial that Wright was never in default and also testified they did not own Mr. Wright's note.
While still on the witness stand, EMC was asked: So you saw Bank of America's errors, but rather than correct the mistakes, you just decided to steal Mr. Wright's home and equity didn't you?" EMC answered: "Yes."
Within moments, the judge shut down the trial and recused herself. The trial was never finished.
Mortgage Servicing FraudWatch Bear Stearns' EMC Mortgage lie in this video. EMC later testified during a... more
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