Quelle Surprise! San Francisco Assessor Finds Pervasive Fraud in Foreclosure Exam (and Paul Jackson Defends His Meal Tickets Yet Again) « naked capitalism

It is clear that there has been widespread abuse of mortgage recording procedures that are being ignored by everyone because no one is willing to stand up for the homeowners or to stand against the banks. It is tragic that the administration and the politicians of this country are unwilling to do the right thing. They are all turning their backs on the people every time a large dollar figure gets waved in front of their eyes as has been done with the bogus settlement with the banks and states AGs. Look at the information provide here from the New York Times and then commented on by Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism.
"So the latest report from San Francisco county should come as no surprise. From Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times, emphasis ours:

An audit by San Francisco county officials of about 400 recent foreclosures there determined that almost all involved either legal violations or suspicious documentation, according to a report released Wednesday….
The improprieties range from the basic — a failure to warn borrowers that they were in default on their loans as required by law — to the arcane. For example, transfers of many loans in the foreclosure files were made by entities that had no right to assign them and institutions took back properties in auctions even though they had not proved ownership.

Yves here. I wish Morgenson had not deemed the latter abuses as “arcane”. They are actually pretty basic to lawyers – you can’t assign rights you don’t possess or sell what you don’t own. And these are concepts that laypeople can grasp readily. Back to the article, which makes clear the state attorney general Kamala Harris, who was doing a victory lap over the mortgage settlement, had nothing to do with this probe:
read the rest by following the link below Quelle Surprise! San Francisco Assessor Finds Pervasive Fraud in Foreclosure Exam (and Paul Jackson Defends His Meal Tickets Yet Again) « naked capitalism

Credit Slips also has another article on the same story about the abuses found in San Francisco.

Here's a bombshell: the San Francisco City Assessor commissioned a serious audit of foreclosure documentation filed in the past few years. The audit examined 400 foreclosures.  It found problems with 85% of them, often multiple problems. What's more, some of the problems are pretty serious as they implicate not only borrowers' rights, but the integrity of mortgage-backed securities and the property title system.
The San Francisco City Assessor's audit also serves as a benchmark for evaluating the Federal-State servicing settlement.  The San Francisco City Assessor managed to accomplish in a few months what the Federal government and state Attorneys General weren't able to do in nearly a year and a half with far greater resources at their disposal:  perform a credible investigation of foreclosure documentation with serious implications about the securitization process in general.  That's a lot of egg on the face of Shaun Donovan, Eric Holder, Tom Miller, et al.  The SF City Assessor report shows that it really wasn't so hard for a motivated party to undertake a serious investigation. And that raises the question of why the largest consumer fraud settlement in history proceeded with virtually no investigation.

"Fraud Digest" Put an end to MERS, but damage already done

 Great article from "Fraud Digest" giving reasons why there should be an end to the scam called MERS that has been ripping off counties and states for several years.  Now they have infected the real estate market in ways that may never be repaired in the next 25 years or more.  It has only complicated the fraud and scam the banks have gotten away with that has vaporized years and years of hard work, years and years of precedent and years and years of law. 

What has changed in the world of mortgage assignments since the FDIC/OCC/Treasury Consent Orders?
When is a mortgage assignment actually an Affidavit posing as a mortgage assignment?
When will all Recorders of Deeds file Declaratory Judgment actions seeking to enjoin the filing of mortgage assignments by document preparers:

1. that falsely state the employer and/or address of the preparer or signer (or that only use the MERS title when the signer is not directly employed by MERS);
2. that fail to plainly set forth the date the mortgage was assigned to the assignee; or
3. that contain language about the holder of the note, such language being extraneous to an Assignment of Mortgage.

Why are such Declaratory Judgment actions needed?
This is the new language appearing on many mortgage assignments where Deutsche Bank National Trust Company is the Trustee the Trust is the Assignee and MERS is the Assignor:
This loan was held by the Assignee prior to the Assignee filing a foreclosure action on May 21, 2008. The date of the execution of this Assignment of Mortgage by the Assignor is not reflective of the date the loan was transferred to the Assignee. The execution of this document is a ministerial act to comply with the state law as to how the transfer is to be documented and is not reflective of the transfer date itself.
(Instrument #2011383648, Official Records, Hillsborough County, Florida.)
This is signed by Srbui Muradyan who is identified as Assistant Secretary, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as Nominee for WMC Mortgage Corp. This document was notarized in Ventura County, CA, on October 25, 2011.
According to a statement in the upper left-hand corner of the document, the preparer was Tanya D. Simpson, Esq., of the law firm Smith, Hiatt & Diaz, P.A., a foreclosure mill in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
The receiving trust is Soundview Home Loan Trust 2007-WMC1.
When was the mortgage assigned to the trust? That essential question is not addressed by the Mortgage Assignment.
The signer and preparer purport to know that the loan (note: not the mortgage - the loan - that is, the promissory note) was held by Deutsche Bank as Trustee prior to May 21, 2008.
How is a Bank of America employee competent to state when Deutsche Bank National Trust Company acquired a loan?
In reality, Srbui Muradyan works for Bank of America in California. On many other mortgage assignments, Muradyan’s name appears as the preparer and the address for Muradyan is 450 E. Boundry Street, Chapin, SC - the address of Corelogic, one of the newest and largest document preparers in the country. (See Assignment of Mortgage, Book 2011, Page 13758, Pottawattamie County, Iowa - available through a Google search.)
Muradyan’s signature is always notarized in Ventura County, CA.
These new Assignments fail to plainly set forth the date that the mortgage was assigned; the individuals signing use a MERS title, never revealing their actual employers; the address of the signers is either not provided or wrongly stated, making it that much more difficult for a homeowner in foreclosure to take a simple deposition.
The OCC Review Process is not working; banks and trusts continue to use the MERS guise to seize properties without proof of ownership. The language has become even more convoluted. Tens of thousands of MERS Mortgage Assignments continue to be filed each month throughout the country.
Attorneys General Beau Biden of Delaware, Martha Coakley of Massachusetts and Eric Schneiderman of New York have all sued MERS and a declaratory judgment and injunctive relief may be part of their overall strategy. Their actions, however, will only help the citizens of Delaware, Massachusetts and New York.
While the many Linda Greens may have retired their pens in Alpharetta, there are hundreds more taking their places, still using MERS titles, still pretending to be bank officers when they are untrained clerks working for document mills.
Another solution is legislative: the Truth in Mortgage Documents Act previously discussed in Fraud Digest.
The simplest solution is for judges everywhere to reject these misleading documents and sanction the filers.
The end of MERS is long overdue.

Fed reveals absurd numbers on bailout

The Fed, in compliance with orders from Congress, today named recipients of $3.3 trillion in emergency aid. Among them were U.S. branches of overseas banks, including Switzerland’s UBS AG; corporations such as General Electric Co. and McDonald’s Corp.; and investors like Pacific Investment Management Co. and computer executive Michael Dell
Lawmakers demanded disclosure, over the Fed’s initial objections, as U.S. central bankers pushed beyond their traditional role of backstopping banks to stem the worst financial panic since the Great Depression. The Fed posted the data on its website to comply with a provision in July’s Dodd- Frank law overhauling financial regulation.  Read the full Story here at Bloomberg. 

It amazes me that nearly every large corporation that wanted to have free money from the fed was able to have access to it repeatedly.  It wasn't just the banks either.  You can see it was GE, MCD, PIC and even Dell. 
I have to say that until this point I was mildly angry about the situation with the banks and how they were relived of any consequences that resulted from their very poor business planning and procedures.  It was a massive transfer of wealth to the majority of players who were responsible for the crisis.  There is no longer any need to say that we think the bankers and Wall Street investment houses were likely responsible because it is well documented that they created a system that was destined to fail. 
It is even more upsetting that the rest of us have had to spend our hard earned money with little or no access to banks funds.   The credit crunch applied to everyone except the large institutions. The capitalist free market idea was completely put aside as the the government tried to sell the bailouts as necessary for the country.  What a complete joke.

I read an article today that the author said the fed saved the country by bailing out the financial system.  This is a statement that can not be proven of course but pure logic says that the it would have been highly unlikely that the entire system would have failed.  The process could have been just as orderly as the Friday bank closings and the process could have started before the Tarp. 
The tarp funds should have been used to close the banks who were grossly over leveraged and put their institutions in jeopardy by leveraging to a 9 to 1 ratio.  If any regulator had made the effort to see what was going on in the CDS , and rmbs markets,  they would have seen a sea of red flags. 
the corrupt nature of Wall Street and the big Banks is common knowledge and now you can throw the fed into the barrel as well.  Hank Paulson committed some of the most egregious acts of nepotism imaginable.

It was so easy for the big players to put themselves first when the crisis broke. They main concern was their cronies and the preached about the devastation to follow if we didn't save the banks and their billion dollars in bonuses they would soon pay out. 

I have a hard time believing this is The United States of America as I learn more and more about the recklessness of Wall Street.  Everything was buzzing about the free market and capitalism as the greatest thing since sliced bread.  While in the background the players were setting the taxpayer of for the biggest fleecing ever. 

Now that it is documented just how self serving the bailouts were for Wall Street I am more angry.  Anyone who is not angry needs to take a closer look at the "structured recession:".  The congress jumped into bed with Wall Street because they didn't have stones to tell  the big guys they were on their own. 

How many people could ride out the storm if they had unlimited, 0% funds?  I am sure most of the would do just find in that situation.  However, the government has seen it fit to let the home owner suffer all the losses so the banks can make more profits on the low interest wait and so they can buy time and wait for the real estate "recovery".




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