Tell me these Judges aren't being bought out by these banks? Tell the truth, with all the money the Government agencies are raking in from these bank fraud cases , why would they allow the actual people being harmed in these cases to win?
Mers is based on fraudulent paperwork - plain and simple
Countrywide was know and has been proven to commit fraud and robo signing.
Deutsche Bank, now here is a surprise, king of Fraud involved.
Robo-Signing is illegal ( remember the 50 AG who , OH that's right, got the money for the states and everyone except the homeowner was helped?)
This is bullshit plain and simple.
Two borrower-initiated lawsuits alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems role in the plaintiffs’ deeds of trust caused them injury were both dismissed by federal judges in the Western District of Washington today.
In Reid v. Countrywide Bank NA, the plaintiff claims the defendants—Countrywide as the lender, LS Title as trustee and MERS as the beneficiary—committed fraud, violated the Washington Consumer Protection Act, were negligent, breached the duty of good faith and fair dealing, placed a cloud on their title, and inflicted emotional distress.
The court immediately dismissed the cloud of title and emotional distress claims filed in the first complaint. Allegations were also rejected that the plaintiff was injured by robo-signing acts and were unaware of who was entitled to receive their mortgage payments.
A second complaint was then submitted, repeating the same allegations identified in the first amended complaint.
U.S. District Court Judge John Coughenour granted MERS’ motion to dismiss this case, ruling that the plaintiff’s claims against the Reston, Va.-based company were speculative at best.
“Although plaintiffs say that they have spent time and money making calls and hiring professionals trying to determine which entity hold the note to their loan, they have not explained how the lack of that information has injured them,” the judge says in the dismissal notice.
“They have not described any disputes that they have been unable to resolve or legal protections of which they have been unable to avail themselves because they do not know who holds their note.”
“Plaintiffs do not state, for example, that they have attempted to identify who holds the note in order to negotiate a loan modification,” the court document says. “Nor have they directed the court any authority stating that the loss of opportunity to engage in such negotiation is a cognizable injury.”
A similar ruling also was handed down from Judge Marsha Pechman, Chief U.S. District Judge of Washington, where she dismissed a wrongful foreclosure complaint against MERS System members and other defendants.
In June 2006, Ryan Wear borrowed $375,200 from Sierra Pacific Mortgage Co. to buy a house in Marysville, Wash. Wear executed a written promissory note, where he agreed to “make all payments under this note in the form of cash, check or money order.”
Wear sued Sierra Pacific, Deutsche Bank, GMAC Mortgage and MERS for fraud, violations of the Washington Consumer Protection Act, accounting, breach of fiduciary duty, violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, breach of the implied duty of good faith and fair dealing, and seeking to avoid the contract, to quiet title, and for declaratory judgment.
The plaintiff alleges that the defendants created and filed false assignments for the note and deed of trust and ultimately initiated nonjudicial foreclosure actions without having acquired any legal interest in the property. Wear also claims that the defendants collected payments to which they were not entitled, and failed to inform him of the true ownership of the loan and deed of trust.
However, the defendants argue that Wear failed to identify any unfair or deceptive act, the alleged unfair or deceptive acts had no impact on the public interest, and no injury was caused by the defendants’ alleged conduct.
Pechman agreed with the defendants, saying the plaintiff failed to show any fraudulent acts committed by MERS or injury caused by the company’s role in plaintiff’s deed of trust.
“The only injury identified by plaintiff is the pending foreclosure of his home,” the judge said in her ruling. “Plaintiff does not claim that any action by the defendants caused or induced the plaintiff to default on the loan…therefore, regardless of who the actual beneficiary was…plaintiff’s property would still face foreclosure.”
http://www.nationalmortgagenews.com/dailybriefing/MERS-Wins-Dismissal-of-Two-Lawsuits-1039986-1.html?ET=nationalmortgage:e5001:490509a:&st=email&utm_source=editorial&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NMN_Daily_Briefing_112013&site=default_tech
Showing posts with label robo signers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label robo signers. Show all posts
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Monday, September 30, 2013
Securitization Audits Successfully Used as Evidence in Robo-Signing Violation Cases
Securitization Audits Successfully Used as Evidence in Robo-Signing Violation Cases
sbwire.com | September 23, 2013
Cheyenne, WY -- (SBWIRE) --
09/23/2013 -- As the foreclosure crisis rages on, robo-signing
continues to play a key role in foreclosure fraud cases.
Robo-signing refers to a variety of practices, all of which violate the foreclosure process and will be exposed on a securitization audit. Robo-signing is the mass signing of documents by someone whose name does not appear on the mortgage document they are signing or by someone who is not authorized to sign mortgage documents. Robo-signers are generally employees of a mortgage servicing company that sign foreclosure documents without reviewing them. Rather than take the additional time to review the specific details of each individual case, robo-signers presume the paperwork to be correct and sign it automatically.
During the housing boom, banks employed robo-signers to process hundreds of thousands of securitized loans. Some robo-signers were qualified mortgage executives that signed mortgage affidavit documents without reviewing the information, while others were temporary workers with virtually no understanding of the work they were doing. Robo-signing can also entail forgery of an executive’s signature or failing to comply with standard notary procedures.
Robo-signing is a violation of the Securities Exchange Commission’s regulations and can be used as evidence to fight foreclosure. If there is proof that a robo-signer signed off on a loan without reviewing the details of the case, he is guilty of committing fraud by claiming knowledge of a financial matter of which he had no personal knowledge.
Robo-signing refers to a variety of practices, all of which violate the foreclosure process and will be exposed on a securitization audit. Robo-signing is the mass signing of documents by someone whose name does not appear on the mortgage document they are signing or by someone who is not authorized to sign mortgage documents. Robo-signers are generally employees of a mortgage servicing company that sign foreclosure documents without reviewing them. Rather than take the additional time to review the specific details of each individual case, robo-signers presume the paperwork to be correct and sign it automatically.
During the housing boom, banks employed robo-signers to process hundreds of thousands of securitized loans. Some robo-signers were qualified mortgage executives that signed mortgage affidavit documents without reviewing the information, while others were temporary workers with virtually no understanding of the work they were doing. Robo-signing can also entail forgery of an executive’s signature or failing to comply with standard notary procedures.
Robo-signing is a violation of the Securities Exchange Commission’s regulations and can be used as evidence to fight foreclosure. If there is proof that a robo-signer signed off on a loan without reviewing the details of the case, he is guilty of committing fraud by claiming knowledge of a financial matter of which he had no personal knowledge.
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Finding Little Evidence Of Foreclosure Fraud
SERIOUSLY WOULD YOU EXPECT ANYTHING LESS FROM A REPUBLICAN BASED PROPAGANDA MAGAZINE? Where do they come up with this shit? No evidence of robo signed documents I have 13 of them! They should take notes from Huffington Post about what real journalists are , this guy is a total ..excuse me.. fuck up!
Over at the Huffington Post they’re still talking about “rampant foreclosure fraud.”
But I was always skeptical of claims banks were stealing houses from
innocent homeowners. One big problem with that theory: Banks lose money
on virtually every house they take back in foreclosure. And now the
federal government seems to agree.
With a pair of terse notices yesterday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency basically admitted that its elaborate process for turning up evidence of fraud in hundreds of thousands of loan files was a waste of money.
With the $8.5 billion settlement with Bank of America, Citi and other lenders, the government abandoned the Independent Foreclosure Review and switched to a system of direct grants to foreclosed borrowers, details to come. In a statement, Comptroller of the Currency Thomas J. Curry said “it has become clear that carrying the process through to its conclusion would divert money away from the impacted homeowners and also needlessly delay the dispensation of compensation to affected borrowers.”
The New York Times reported today concerns grew “in the upper echelons of the comptroller’s office” at the cost of the loan reviews, which consumed up to 20 hours per file at $250 an hour. Banks spent $1.5 billion on this snipe hunt without turning up meaningful examples of fraud, the Times reports. That money could have been handed out to borrowers in the form of a $5,000 check for each file.
The outcome shouldn’t come as a surprise. After I wrote a piece critical of the parallel mortgage settlement with state attorneys general last year, comparing it to the deeply flawed tobacco settlement, I was barraged with comments from critics accusing me of downplaying foreclosure fraud. I responded with one simple question: Has there been a single case in the past five years of a homeowner who was current on his mortgage being foreclosed through fraud?
Silence. I did get a lot of legal gobbledygook from marginally competent lawyers who, as it turns out, were the real crooks in the foreclosure crisis. For excessive fees, they offered underwater borrowers the false hope they could somehow keep their homes without paying for them, either by challenging the foreclosure paperwork or convincing a judge that the national registry system known as MERS was not the legitimate party to foreclose. Those tactics mostly failed. The Federal Trade Commission has a website devoted to protecting borrowers from the real scammers in the foreclosure crisis, and prosecutors have found plenty of fraud. Last September North Carolina AG Roy Cooper, for example, sued three foreclosure assistance firms for charging upfront fees and delivering nothing in return.
The reality is robosigning couldn’t have been the cause of foreclosure fraud because robots can’t engage in the self-interested behavior that underlies fraud. Robosigning was just an acknowledgement that in a large, modern lending institution only the central computer registry of mortgages contains all the information about loans, and no lawyer at the periphery can possibly possess additional information beyond what is in that registry. It may be nice to conjure up the image of a kindly loan officer, familiar with the circumstances of every person behind every home mortgage, but that’s not how the system works in big banks.
The OCC released an interim report on the Independent Foreclosure Review program last June, detailing the agency’s ambitious plans for getting to the bottom of foreclosure fraud. It sent out letters to 4.4 million borrowers, ran ads in 1,400 publications including Parade, People magazine, and USA Weekend, as well as Hispanic and African-American publications, and racked up an estimated 341 million impressions. Nearly 200,000 people submitted their files for review and regulators selected another 142,817 files for “look-back” reviews.
About the same time, the GAO released a report critical of the foreclosure review program, which involved servicers handling two-thirds of U.S. mortgages, because it didn’t provide clear enough information for borrowers.
But by retreating to a class-action style payout system, where borrowers simply receive lump sums, the feds seem to be acknowledging that there wasn’t much outright fraud — as in banks stealing houses from innocent borrowers — to find.
Fraud is a flexible term, of course, and many lawyers think it includes lending money to people who have no hope of paying it back. This so-called “predatory lending” doesn’t make any economic sense, unless you’re willing to buy the theory that the fees flowing from an ultimately unprofitable loan were enough to induce bankers to destroy their own institutions in search of a year-end bonus. That’s possible, but it downplays the responsibility of the borrowers who signed detailed loan documents, filled with caveats and cooling-off periods mandated by federal regulators.
As for robosigning computers stealing homes, still not much evidence for that. If you know of a case, do let me know.
Finding Little Evidence Of Foreclosure Fraud, Feds Give Up
|
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
With a pair of terse notices yesterday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency basically admitted that its elaborate process for turning up evidence of fraud in hundreds of thousands of loan files was a waste of money.
With the $8.5 billion settlement with Bank of America, Citi and other lenders, the government abandoned the Independent Foreclosure Review and switched to a system of direct grants to foreclosed borrowers, details to come. In a statement, Comptroller of the Currency Thomas J. Curry said “it has become clear that carrying the process through to its conclusion would divert money away from the impacted homeowners and also needlessly delay the dispensation of compensation to affected borrowers.”
The New York Times reported today concerns grew “in the upper echelons of the comptroller’s office” at the cost of the loan reviews, which consumed up to 20 hours per file at $250 an hour. Banks spent $1.5 billion on this snipe hunt without turning up meaningful examples of fraud, the Times reports. That money could have been handed out to borrowers in the form of a $5,000 check for each file.
The outcome shouldn’t come as a surprise. After I wrote a piece critical of the parallel mortgage settlement with state attorneys general last year, comparing it to the deeply flawed tobacco settlement, I was barraged with comments from critics accusing me of downplaying foreclosure fraud. I responded with one simple question: Has there been a single case in the past five years of a homeowner who was current on his mortgage being foreclosed through fraud?
Silence. I did get a lot of legal gobbledygook from marginally competent lawyers who, as it turns out, were the real crooks in the foreclosure crisis. For excessive fees, they offered underwater borrowers the false hope they could somehow keep their homes without paying for them, either by challenging the foreclosure paperwork or convincing a judge that the national registry system known as MERS was not the legitimate party to foreclose. Those tactics mostly failed. The Federal Trade Commission has a website devoted to protecting borrowers from the real scammers in the foreclosure crisis, and prosecutors have found plenty of fraud. Last September North Carolina AG Roy Cooper, for example, sued three foreclosure assistance firms for charging upfront fees and delivering nothing in return.
The reality is robosigning couldn’t have been the cause of foreclosure fraud because robots can’t engage in the self-interested behavior that underlies fraud. Robosigning was just an acknowledgement that in a large, modern lending institution only the central computer registry of mortgages contains all the information about loans, and no lawyer at the periphery can possibly possess additional information beyond what is in that registry. It may be nice to conjure up the image of a kindly loan officer, familiar with the circumstances of every person behind every home mortgage, but that’s not how the system works in big banks.
The OCC released an interim report on the Independent Foreclosure Review program last June, detailing the agency’s ambitious plans for getting to the bottom of foreclosure fraud. It sent out letters to 4.4 million borrowers, ran ads in 1,400 publications including Parade, People magazine, and USA Weekend, as well as Hispanic and African-American publications, and racked up an estimated 341 million impressions. Nearly 200,000 people submitted their files for review and regulators selected another 142,817 files for “look-back” reviews.
About the same time, the GAO released a report critical of the foreclosure review program, which involved servicers handling two-thirds of U.S. mortgages, because it didn’t provide clear enough information for borrowers.
But by retreating to a class-action style payout system, where borrowers simply receive lump sums, the feds seem to be acknowledging that there wasn’t much outright fraud — as in banks stealing houses from innocent borrowers — to find.
Fraud is a flexible term, of course, and many lawyers think it includes lending money to people who have no hope of paying it back. This so-called “predatory lending” doesn’t make any economic sense, unless you’re willing to buy the theory that the fees flowing from an ultimately unprofitable loan were enough to induce bankers to destroy their own institutions in search of a year-end bonus. That’s possible, but it downplays the responsibility of the borrowers who signed detailed loan documents, filled with caveats and cooling-off periods mandated by federal regulators.
As for robosigning computers stealing homes, still not much evidence for that. If you know of a case, do let me know.
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