tagged w/ U.S. Bank
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Is your mortgage signed by someone named Linda Green?
Repeating a story that has been in the press for several months, with continued investigative research, easy to understand delivery, and access to millions of American viewers, 60 Minutes - helps millions discover valuable information about mortgage fraud.
Who cares how many times this story is in the news? This poster's does - hence is loading it on Current! Read on, and repost folks!!
60Mins - grew up with'm - still seek them out from time to time - glad to see this piece, will be hitting a huge market tonight!
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/04/01/60minutes/main20049646_page2.shtml
Produced by Robert Anderson and Daniel Ruetenik
(CBS News) If there was a question about whether we're headed for a second housing shock, that was settled last week with news that home prices have fallen a sixth consecutive month. Values are nearly back to levels of the Great Recession. One thing weighing on the economy is the huge number of foreclosed houses.
Many are stuck on the market for a reason you wouldn't expect: banks can't find the ownership documents.
Who really owns your mortgage?
Scott Pelley explains a bizarre aftershock of the U.S. financial collapse: An epidemic of forged and missing mortgage documents.
It's bizarre but, it turns out, Wall Street cut corners when it created those mortgage-backed investments that triggered the financial collapse. Now that banks want to evict people, they're unwinding these exotic investments to find, that often, the legal documents behind the mortgages aren't there. Caught in a jam of their own making, some companies appear to be resorting to forgery and phony paperwork to throw people - down on their luck - out of their homes.
In the 1930s we had breadlines; venture out before dawn in America today and you'll find mortgage lines. This past January in Los Angeles, 37,000 homeowners facing foreclosure showed up to an event to beg their bank for lower payments on their mortgage. Some people even slept on the sidewalk to get in line.
So many in the country are desperate now that they have to meet in convention centers coast to coast.
In February in Miami, 12,000 people showed up to a similar event. The line went down the block and doubled back twice.
Video: The next housing shock
Extra: Eviction reprieve
Extra: "Save the Dream" events
Dale DeFreitas lost her job and now fears her home is next. "It's very emotional because I just think about it. I don't wanna lose my home. I really don't," she told "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley.
"It's your American dream," he remarked.
"It was. And still is," she replied.
These convention center events are put on by the non-profit Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, which helps people figure what they can afford, and then walks them across the hall to bank representatives to ask for lower payments. More than half will get their mortgages adjusted, but the rest discover that they just can't keep their home.
For many that's when the real surprise comes in: these same banks have fouled up all of their own paperwork to a historic degree.
"In my mind this is an absolute, intentional fraud," Lynn Szymoniak, who is fighting foreclosure, told Pelley.
While trying to save her house, she discovered something we did not know: back when Wall Street was using algorithms and computers to engineer those disastrous mortgage-backed securities, it appears they didn't want old fashioned paperwork slowing down the profits.
"This was back when it was a white hot fevered pitch to move as many of these as possible," Pelley remarked.
"Exactly. When you could make a whole lotta money through securitization. And every other aspect of it could be done electronically, you know, key strokes. This was the only piece where somebody was supposed to actually go get documents, transfer the documents from one entity to the other. And it looks very much like they just eliminated that stuff all together," Szymoniak said.
Szymoniak's mortgage had been bundled with thousands of others into one of those Wall Street securities traded from investor to investor. When the bank took her to court, it first said it had lost her documents, including the critical assignment of mortgage which transfers ownership. But then, there was a courthouse surprise.
"They found all of your paperwork more than a year after they initially said that they had lost it?" Pelley asked.
"Yes," she replied.
Asked if that seemed suspicious to her, Szymoniak said, "Yes, absolutely. What do you imagine? It fell behind the file cabinet? Where was all of this? 'We had it, we own it, we lost it.' And then more recently, everyone is coming in saying, 'Hey we found it. Isn't that wonderful?'"
But what the bank may not have known is that Szymoniak is a lawyer and fraud investigator with a specialty in forged documents. She has trained FBI agents.
She told Pelley she asked for copies of those documents.
Asked what she found, Szymoniak told Pelley, "When I looked at the assignment of my mortgage, and this is the assignment: it looked that even the date they put in, which was 10/17/08, was several months after they sued me for foreclosure. So, what they were saying to the court was, 'We sued her in July of 2008 and we acquired this mortgage in October of 2008.' It made absolutely no sense."
Curious, she used her legal training to go online and research 10,000 mortgages.
"I often, because of my training, look for patterns. And then I began to find the strange signatures," she explained.
One of the strangest signatures belonged to the bank vice president who had signed Szymoniak's newly discovered mortgage documents. The name is Linda Green. But, on thousands of other mortgages, the style of Green's signature changed a lot.
And, even more remarkable, Szymoniak found Green was vice president of 20 banks - all at the same time.
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READ ON REST of PAGE 2, + PAGES 3 & 4 - at LINK
##Is your mortgage signed by someone named Linda Green?
Repeating a story that has... more
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The end of credit cards is coming
chart_mobile_payment.top.gif
Mobile payments are expected to hit $214 billion by 2015. Transactions made by scanning a mobile phone at the register are forecast to reach $22 billion -- up from "practically none" last year.
By Blake Ellis, CNN staff reporter
January 24, 2011: 11:00 AM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Credit cards may soon be as outdated as vinyl records. (Remember those?) And this is the year that the slow, steady march to oblivion begins.
You can already use your iPhone, Droid or BlackBerry to buy a hotdog at the ballgame, buy your Starbucks latté, or give a friend a few bucks by Bumping phones. But by the end of the year you may not even think twice about reaching for your phone to pay at the register instead of fumbling for your credit card.
"Your plastic card hasn't changed since the age of the vinyl records," said Michael Abbott, CEO of Isis, a new mobile payment network. "This is the chance to bring payments forward from the plastic age and the vinyl records age to the digital age."
While companies have been experimenting with contactless mobile payments for years, 2011 is expected to be the year the technology really takes off. That's because millions of phones capable of making contactless payments are expected to be shipped out in 2011.
As a result, this pay-by-phone market is forecast to make up $22 billion in transactions by 2015, up from "practically none" last year, according to research firm Aite Group.
0:00 /1:51Your phone is becoming your wallet
"Mobile payment is going to get really interesting and is going to see a lot of activity in 2011," said George Peabody, director of emerging technologies at Mercator Advisory Group. "We're going to start seeing more and more people leaving their homes without their wallets."
But that doesn't mean it's going to happen overnight, said Jane Cloninger, director at Edgar Dunn & Co., a consulting firm specializing in financial services and payments.
"I definitely believe that the mobile wallet will eventually replace the plastic card -- but it's going to take some time because consumer habits take a long time to change," she said. "But where before it's been a lot of discussion, we're at the point now where you're going to start seeing momentum toward it and going to see it move beyond the trials and into reality."
Companies including Visa, MasterCard, Google, Bank of America, Citi and U.S. Bank are all testing contactless mobile payments, and many expect to roll out mobile wallets this year.
"2011 is going to be a very exciting, very dynamic year when it comes to mobile payments because it's the Wild West again, with all these players positioning in various different ways to redefine the digital payments landscape," said Michael Upton, senior vice president of online and mobile banking at Bank of America, which expects to launch it own mobile wallet later this year.
Meanwhile, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon joined forces with Discover and Barclays in November to form Isis and provide a rival to Visa and MasterCard.
9 ways your $$ is going sci-fi
"It's a glorious competitive battle amongst some of the largest entities in the country," said Peabody.
The Isis mobile wallet will let consumers store multiple cards, make payments with the wave of their phone, check balances, receive coupons and use rewards points at the point of sale. But it may stretch beyond just the money in your wallet. Abbott sees the potential to include your insurance cards, driver's licenses, and other information typically found in a wallet.
"[Payment] is where we're going to start, but where it goes is wide open to the innovation of other players who want to be involved," he said.
Beth Robertson, a payments analyst at Javelin Research and Strategy, said that could mean developing ways for consumers to make contactless ATM withdrawals by simply waving a phone in front of an ATM as you would at the point of sale.
But because of just how much your smartphone now holds, it's quickly becoming your most dangerous device.
"We're increasingly living our lives on our cell phones...The problem is that we're not yet used to thinking about our wallet in terms of our phone," said Ed Goodman of Identity Theft 911. "No matter how good security on any type of mobile banking or payments, there are going to be people who are able to find a way around it -- it's really all about making sure everyone ramps up their awareness." To top of pageThe end of credit cards is coming
chart_mobile_payment.top.gif
Mobile payments... more
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