Foreclosure Fraud: First Criminal Charges Filed In Nevada Over Robo-Signing
The Nevada attorney general has indicted two midlevel staffers at a mortgage document company, Lender Processing Services, on a whopping 606 counts of felony and gross misdemeanor for directing employees to forge signatures and falsely notarize documents used to illegally foreclose on Nevada homeowners.
Nevada's is the first criminal indictment since last year's discovery of the nationwide "robo-signing" scandal, in which mortgage servicing companies and banks were processing foreclosures en masse at lightning speed by signing documents they neglected to review and falsifying information.
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This has been going on all over the nation, thousands of times per day, and this is the first time anybody has been charged with a crime. Absolutely unbelievable. I know somebody is going to comment that the defrauding of HOA/condo residents is infinitely worse, but it isn't. You have to get some sense of proportion here. The scope of mortgage foreclosure fraud is on a different order of magnitude. Millions of people--not hundreds, or thousands--millions of people have been tossed out on the street over the last three few years, and the evidence shows that an enormous percentage of these cases involved perjured affidavits, nonexistent original notes, and kangaroo "rocket docket" courts. There are millions more foreclosures waiting to be filed.
And this comes after the subprime mortgage racket that produced all the toxic mortgage backed securities that wrecked the financial sector, crashed the economy, and tanked housing prices for a decade. And then there is the mortgage rescue fraud racket, run by some of the same crooks who used to run the subprime racket.
2 comments:
...and $1 bets that the vast majority of all of those homes are burdened by involuntary membership in HOA corporations.
The fraud for these consumers started with the sale of a defective product to begin with. On the product side, you have Community Associations Institute, the National Association of Realtors, and the National Association of Builders. On the finance side you have the Mortgage Bankers Association. These are all trade groups that have promoted a wholesale feeding frenzy on consumers. These groups have spent inordinate amounts of ill-gotten gains (taken from consumers) to promote legislation that keeps homeowners soft targets.
What is unusual about the Nevada case is that an AG is actually prosecuting individuals for these crimes. In HOA land it is quite common for the HOA's agents to manufacture documents and false testimony - and the trade group routinely points out that there are 60 million people burdened by these abominations. CAI, NAB, and NAR market these places as utopias where societal ills have simply been contracted out of existence and financial success is assured. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. All three will proclaim that it was choice to live in such a burdened subdivision and if you don't like it "move" (to a subdivision with another HOA, of course). All of them profit from the churn created by the misery of homeownership in these places.
Get rid of the HOAs and you are going to be putting a serious wrench in the cogs of the commoditization and securitization machine of the MBA, the NAB, NAR, and CAI - all of which view you as the prey and the HOA is a major enabling trap.
FRAUDULENT HOA is worse. I do know how bad this is though, and both classes of victims need and deserve to be rectified. The perpetrators, no matter how far up the food chain, need to be prosecuted for their roles. Especially, in the states where these foreclosures are illegal.
It should not matter if the scamsters are judges, lawyers, property managers, insurance industry or legislators, or other connected. Let them be prosecuted, jail time and their assets sold to compensate their victims. Let them find out what it feels like to be made homeless. The difference, they are the criminals, not the innocent homeowners.
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