From Nevada Office of Attorney General 2 arrests in mortgage payment scam

OFFICEOF THEATTORNEYGENERAL


Catherine Cortez Masto, Attorney General

555 E. Washington Avenue, Suite 3900

Las Vegas, Nevada 89101

Telephone - (702) 486-3420

Fax - (702) 486-3283

Web - http://ag.state.nv.us

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Edie Cartwright

February 3, 2011 775.684.1189

TWO ARRESTS MADE IN

MORTGAGE PAYMENT THEFT SCAM

Las Vegas, NV – The Nevada Attorney General’s office announced today that Joseph Yorkus (age 49) and James Bartczak (age 48), both of Las Vegas, were arrested today for allegedly operating a scam intended to steal mortgage payments from homeowners.

It is alleged that Yorkus and Bartczak set up “Great Western Business Services” to steal homeowners’ mortgage payments by fraudulently claiming the mortgage holder’s loan servicer had changed. This scam would potentially result in putting the victim homeowners in default with their actual mortgage servicers.

“This type of corporate identity theft is devastating to the homeowner victim and to the true loan servicer, both of whom are harmed by these types of scams,” said Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto.

The scam involved sending letters to homeowners falsely stating that servicing of the homeowners’ loans had been transferred from Bank of America to Great Western Business Services. The letters instruct homeowners to send their mortgage payments to Great Western Business Services instead of the true servicer, Bank of America.

The alleged scam would result in victims unknowingly missing one or more mortgage payments which could result in a potential notice of default and foreclosure, despite the fact that the homeowner had actually made their payments, albeit to the scammers instead of their true loan servicer.

The case was investigated and is being prosecuted by the Attorney General’s Mortgage Fraud Task Force within the Bureau of Criminal Justice Fraud Division. The charges against the named individuals are merely allegations. The Defendants are presumed innocent until or unless proven otherwise in a court of law.

Anyone who has information regarding this case should contact the Attorney General’s Office at 702.486-3194 in Las Vegas or 775.684-1180 in Carson City.
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States Where Housing Will Rebound First - Real Time Economics - WSJ

Here is an article on which states may see housing recovery first. I am not sure if they first three could actually have a recovery when they didn't seem to have a meltdown like most parts of the USA. But the Article might be interesting for real estate watchers.


 States Where Housing Will Rebound First - Real Time Economics - WSJ




Learn to profit from Penny Stocks here

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Key Bank foreclosure makes no financial sense

Banking and the business cycle;: A study of the great depression in the United States

My response to a reader comment regarding this article in the Wall Street Journal

Punitive measures taken by banks to reinforce other home owners to keep paying their mortgages are weak arguments at best. Thousands of mortgage modifications were done during the great depression and we don’t hear stories from the self righteous about how we should have let those people live on the street. Nor do we hear that people all decided to stop paying their mortgage because someone else who was in trouble got a loan modification. The problem is much more systemic and continues to pose a major risk to our financial system, modifying loans is one logical step to stop the downward spiral. If you are one of the people who would rather never be able to sell your home keep pushing for a massive foreclosure push by the banks, whether or not they are the legal owners of the defaulting property.
Wake up and smell the 2 x 4s. If we would have not had credit default swaps and other derivative products that were designed to let Wall Street squeeze three times the value out of a mortgage, we would not have seen half of the defaults.

It is absurd that banks would go out of their way to take an even greater loss on a property so they could complete a foreclosure.

We have let these people, those in charge at the banks, have free reign with billions of tax payer dollars. Most of the bankers still have their jobs. Clearly something is wrong this picture.

yes it is true, plenty of "smart" people can behave very "stupidly"

Adam Levitin asks some important questions in this article
From Credit Slips, questioning how "smart" are the "smart" people ?

posted by Adam Levitin


In relation to the chain of title argument on securitization, I have been repeatedly confronted (often unsolicited) with an argument that there's no way there were massive screw-ups because thousands of top Wall Street legal minds were working on securitization deals. Yes, and there's no way the underwriting was lousy on the mortgages themselves because thousands were being done. I tend to get this argument from people with a large financial stake in ensuring that securitizations don't fail. This is a really bad argument, so let me just debunk it now (and hopefully never hear it again):

Continue Reading here

creation of a society indebted to creditors. By design?

Stoller: A Debtcropper Society



By Matt Stoller, a blogger-turned Congressional staffer. He was a policy advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson on financial policy issues. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0.


From the Article published at Naked Capitalism  "A lot of people forget that having debt you can’t pay back really sucks. Debt is not just a credit instrument, it is an instrument of political and economic control."


"Today, we are in the midst of creating a second sharecropper society. I first heard the term “slaves to the bank” from a constituent fighting a fraudulent foreclosure.......... we should recognize that what the creditor class wants is what they’ve always wanted: total dominance of our culture." Find the complete Article Here



Stoler makes some very interesting points.  It is very true that creditors have always wanted to your personal finances at stake any time you take a loan.  We are seeing the perfect example now as we go through the foreclosure crisis.  People have always been forced take out loans in there name rather than in a business name or LLC.  This has been the banks way of locking borrowers in for life, regardless of changes in the economy or employment. 

Today we have millions of Americans underwater with there mortgages with little hope of ever having the home regain its original value.  The large too big to fail banks and insurers have already been bailed out and were given opportunities to "write down" their debt.  The home owner, however, has not only lost their nest egg for retirement, possibly their home, and credit score because the banks are looking to cash in again on this mortgages.  They seem to feel entitled to treat borrows with contempt because they have punitive powers that will take away the rights of citizens. 

What would a creditor do if they had take a major loss because of an economic downturn?  Consider something other than the usual response of milking tax payers to pay their debt.  They would file bankruptcy and restructure, hold their head high, be treated as responsible business people who just hit a rough patch.  The would not be shamed or berated by the media, politicians or the public.  They would likely survive the downturn with out losing any of their personal assets.  Donald Trump has filed bankruptcy for his businesses on more than one occasion but we never hear any say he is "deadbeat" or that he brought it on himself by "buying what he couldn't afford". 

Read more on  how lenders manipulated social views so much that people have been brainwashed into thinking it is much more shameful to default on your home loan than it is to default on a loan or your business.

Banks still defending perjury and fraud as acceptable

Banks told not to fix a fraud wsj

-Thank our founding fathers for the states ability to enforce certain laws that the federal government chooses to ignore.  Well , except for what pushes forward the administrations agenda ---oh yeh Az sued by federal government because they were trying to enforce policy that the Obama thought would negatively effect the democratic party.  Obama will show that he is even more tone deaf to the realities of the banking fiasco if he dares to sue the states to keep them from enforcing laws and regulation against the banks.  --

bold and italics added

("The banks are committing fraud on the court, essentially perjury, and then saying 'Whoops! You caught me! Here's some different evidence and use that instead,' " Mr. Cordray said in an interview Friday. "I know a lot of judges are not going to take kindly to that."



Wells Fargo Chief Financial Officer Howard Atkins said in an Oct. 20 television interview that he was "confident with our policies and controls" related to foreclosures and that "the person at Wells who signs a foreclosure file is the same person as the person who reviews the file and it is not always done that way in the industry.")

----of course Wells was doing all the right things and would never doing anything that was considered fraud and Atkins says "confident with our policies and controls" but one week later after back lash from AGs and attorneys did a flip flop on Oct 28, 2010--


(But on Oct. 28, Wells announced it was resubmitting affidavits for 55,000 pending foreclosures, suggesting that some of the paperwork might be flawed. In March, a Wells Fargo employee named Xee Moua said in a sworn deposition in a Florida foreclosure case that she signed between 300 and 500 foreclosure documents a day, without reviewing the numbers on the loan files for accuracy.


Bank of America declined to comment. A Wells Fargo spokeswoman said Friday the company intends to cooperate with Mr. Cordray's inquiries and doesn't "believe that any of these instances led to foreclosures which should not have otherwise occurred." She added that Wells Fargo has "chosen to submit supplemental affidavits out of an abundance of caution.")

----The banks have reached the pinnacle of arrogance and narcissism.  We all know that banks to do nothing in the abundance of caution unless they are on the verge of being busted!  I hope the judges are all willing to hold the banks accountable for their creation of DTFMS (destined to fail mortgage system) know ing they were seens as TBTFB (too big to fail bank) that is allowed to pass their loses on to the tax payer.  Of course they get to keep the profits they have claimed over the past several years and we get sold down the river.  ---
-----my comments
(  )  from article

Banks throw in towel on run down property

This article in the New York times reveals just how crazy the foreclosure situation has become this year. The value of real estate in some areas has declined so much that the banks doesn't even want to claim the property in order try and recoupe losses. We have had a major meldtown in the economy and with housing. It should be clear that there are few winners when fluctations in pricing are so severe.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/30/us/30walkaway.html?em