Showing posts with label foreclosure fraud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label foreclosure fraud. Show all posts
Monday, June 20, 2011
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
In Prison for Taking a Liar Loan
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| Dees Illustration |
New York Times
A few weeks ago, when the Justice Department decided not to prosecute Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide, I wrote a column lamenting the fact that none of the big fish were likely to go to prison for their roles in the financial crisis.
Soon after that column ran, I received an e-mail from a man named Richard Engle, who informed me that I was wrong. There was, in fact, someone behind bars for what he’d supposedly done during the subprime bubble. It was his 48-year-old son, Charlie.
On Valentine’s Day, the elder Mr. Engle said, his son had entered a minimum-security prison in Beaver, W.Va., to begin serving a 21-month sentence for mortgage fraud. He then proceeded to tell me the tale of how federal agents nabbed his son — a tale he backed up with reams of documents and records that suggest, if nothing else, that when the federal government is truly motivated, there is no mountain it won’t move to prosecute someone it wants to nail. And it was definitely motivated to nail Charlie Engle.
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Saturday, March 12, 2011
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
POWERFUL FORECLOSURE TESTIMONY: Women Goes OFF on Congress (VIDEO)
Youtube
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Wall Street Quietly Creates a New Way to Profit From Homeowner Distress
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Saturday, December 18, 2010
Chase Foreclosure Protest: 22 Arrested In LA
Jacob Adelman
Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — Police arrested 22 demonstrators who blocked entry to a downtown Chase bank branch Thursday to protest what they said were unfair home foreclosures.
The demonstrators, which included homeowners facing foreclosure, community advocates and labor leaders, silently allowed officers to bind their wrists behind their backs with plastic restraints and guide them into a police van.
Dozens more demonstrators chanted and marched on a nearby sidewalk holding sighs that said "Stop Bank Greed, Save Our Neighborhoods" as the 12 men and 10 women were taken into custody.
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RELATED ARTICLES:
10 Ways You're Being Fleeced by Banks
5 Signs The End is Near For The Criminal Banks
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Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — Police arrested 22 demonstrators who blocked entry to a downtown Chase bank branch Thursday to protest what they said were unfair home foreclosures.
The demonstrators, which included homeowners facing foreclosure, community advocates and labor leaders, silently allowed officers to bind their wrists behind their backs with plastic restraints and guide them into a police van.
Dozens more demonstrators chanted and marched on a nearby sidewalk holding sighs that said "Stop Bank Greed, Save Our Neighborhoods" as the 12 men and 10 women were taken into custody.
Read Full Article
RELATED ARTICLES:
10 Ways You're Being Fleeced by Banks
5 Signs The End is Near For The Criminal Banks
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Saturday, December 4, 2010
Fed wants to strip a key protection for homeowners
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| Dees Illustration |
McClatchy
WASHINGTON — As Americans continue to lose their homes in record numbers, the Federal Reserve is considering making it much harder for homeowners to stop foreclosures and escape predatory home loans with onerous terms.
The Fed's proposal to amend a 42-year-old provision of the federal Truth in Lending Act has angered labor, civil rights and consumer advocacy groups along with a slew of foreclosure defense attorneys.
They're not only asking the Fed to withdraw the proposal, they also want any future changes to the law to be handled by the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which begins its work next year.
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Friday, November 12, 2010
Matt Taibbi: Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners
Retired judges are rushing through complex cases to speed foreclosures in Florida
Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
The Real Reason America’s Cities and Towns Are Broke
The rocket docket wasn't created to investigate any of that. It exists to launder the crime and bury the evidence by speeding thousands of fraudulent and predatory loans to the ends of their life cycles, so that the houses attached to them can be sold again with clean paperwork. The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville judge, the Honorable A.C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes.
Exclusive Excerpt: America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi's Griftopia
Foreclosure lawyers told me one other thing about the rocket docket. The hearings, they said, aren't exactly public. "The judges might give you a hard time about watching," one lawyer warned. "They're not exactly anxious for people to know about this stuff." Inwardly, I laughed at this — it sounded like typical activist paranoia. The notion that a judge would try to prevent any citizen, much less a member of the media, from watching an open civil hearing sounded ridiculous. Fucked-up as everyone knows the state of Florida is, it couldn't be that bad. It isn't Indonesia. Right?
Well, not quite. When I went to sit in on Judge Soud's courtroom in downtown Jacksonville, I was treated to an intimate, and at times breathtaking, education in the horror of the foreclosure crisis, which is rapidly emerging as the even scarier sequel to the financial meltdown of 2008: Invasion of the Home Snatchers II. In Las Vegas, one in 25 homes is now in foreclosure. In Fort Myers, Florida, one in 35. In September, lenders nationwide took over a rec ord 102,134 properties; that same month, more than a third of all home sales were distressed properties. All told, some 820,000 Americans have already lost their homes this year, and another 1 million currently face foreclosure.
Throughout the mounting catastrophe, however, many Americans have been slow to comprehend the true nature of the mortgage disaster. They seemed to have grasped just two things about the crisis: One, a lot of people are getting their houses foreclosed on. Two, some of the banks doing the foreclosing seem to have misplaced their paperwork.
Read Full Article
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Rolling Stone
The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This "rocket docket," as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn't even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn't to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
The Real Reason America’s Cities and Towns Are Broke
The rocket docket wasn't created to investigate any of that. It exists to launder the crime and bury the evidence by speeding thousands of fraudulent and predatory loans to the ends of their life cycles, so that the houses attached to them can be sold again with clean paperwork. The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville judge, the Honorable A.C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes.
Exclusive Excerpt: America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi's Griftopia
Foreclosure lawyers told me one other thing about the rocket docket. The hearings, they said, aren't exactly public. "The judges might give you a hard time about watching," one lawyer warned. "They're not exactly anxious for people to know about this stuff." Inwardly, I laughed at this — it sounded like typical activist paranoia. The notion that a judge would try to prevent any citizen, much less a member of the media, from watching an open civil hearing sounded ridiculous. Fucked-up as everyone knows the state of Florida is, it couldn't be that bad. It isn't Indonesia. Right?
Well, not quite. When I went to sit in on Judge Soud's courtroom in downtown Jacksonville, I was treated to an intimate, and at times breathtaking, education in the horror of the foreclosure crisis, which is rapidly emerging as the even scarier sequel to the financial meltdown of 2008: Invasion of the Home Snatchers II. In Las Vegas, one in 25 homes is now in foreclosure. In Fort Myers, Florida, one in 35. In September, lenders nationwide took over a rec ord 102,134 properties; that same month, more than a third of all home sales were distressed properties. All told, some 820,000 Americans have already lost their homes this year, and another 1 million currently face foreclosure.
Throughout the mounting catastrophe, however, many Americans have been slow to comprehend the true nature of the mortgage disaster. They seemed to have grasped just two things about the crisis: One, a lot of people are getting their houses foreclosed on. Two, some of the banks doing the foreclosing seem to have misplaced their paperwork.
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Saturday, November 6, 2010
ForeclosureGate Could Force Bank Nationalization
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| Dees Illustration - Web of Debt |
Web of Debt
For two years, politicians have danced around the nationalization issue, but ForeclosureGate may be the last straw. The megabanks are too big to fail, but they aren’t too big to reorganize as federal institutions serving the public interest.
In January 2009, only a week into Obama’s presidency, David Sanger reported in The New York Times that nationalizing the banks was being discussed. Privately, the Obama economic team was conceding that more taxpayer money was going to be needed to shore up the banks. When asked whether nationalization was a good idea, House speaker Nancy Pelosi replied:
“Well, whatever you want to call it . . . . If we are strengthening them, then the American people should get some of the upside of that strengthening. Some people call that nationalization.
“I’m not talking about total ownership,” she quickly cautioned — stopping herself by posing a question: “Would we have ever thought we would see the day when we’d be using that terminology? ‘Nationalization of the banks?’ ”Noted Matthew Rothschild in a March 2009 editorial:
[T]hat’s the problem today. The word “nationalization” shuts off the debate. Never mind that Britain, facing the same crisis we are, just nationalized the Bank of Scotland. Never mind that Ronald Reagan himself considered such an option during a global banking crisis in the early 1980s.Although nationalization sounds like socialism, it is actually what is supposed to happen under our capitalist system when a major bank goes bankrupt. The bank is put into receivership under the FDIC, which takes it over.
What fits the socialist label more, in fact, is the TARP bank bailout, sometimes called “welfare for the rich.” The banks' losses and risks have been socialized but the profits have not. The bankers have been feasting on our dime without sharing the spread.
And that was before ForeclosureGate – the uncovering of massive fraud in the foreclosure process. Investors are now suing to put defective loans back on bank balance sheets. If they win, the banks will be hopelessly under water.
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Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Wells Fargo Repossesses A Fully Paid Off Car (VIDEO)
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Saturday, October 30, 2010
The Fed Bought Fraud
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| Dees Illustration |
USA Watchdog
In the wake of the financial meltdown of 2008, the Federal Reserve announced it would buy mortgage-backed securities, or MBS. The January announcement by the Fed said it would buy MBS from failed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the amount of $1.25 trillion. At the time, the Fed said in a press release, “The goal of the program was to provide support to mortgage and housing markets and to foster improved conditions in financial markets more generally.” (Click here for the full Fed statement.) It did provide “support” to the mortgage market, but did it also buy fraud and cover the banks that sold it? The evidence shows, at the very least, it bought massive amounts of fraud.
We now know the Fed definitely bought valueless MBS because it has joined other ripped-off investors to demand Bank of America buy back billions in sour home debt. A Bloomberg story from just last week, featuring Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser, reports, “The New York Fed, which acquired mortgage debt in the 2008 rescues of Bear Stearns Cos. and American International Group Inc., has joined a bondholder group that aims to force Bank of America Corp. to buy back some bad home loans packaged into $47 billion of securities. On the one hand, the Fed has “a duty to the taxpayer to try to collect on behalf of the taxpayer on these mortgages,” Plosser said today at an event in Philadelphia.”
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Homeowners Get The Boot For Bad Paperwork While Banks Get Millions For Same
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| Dees Illustration |
Huffington Post
Mortgage companies enrolled in the Obama administration's signature foreclosure-prevention initiative may be receiving taxpayer funds despite not having a legal right to the home or to the mortgage, a top Treasury Department official revealed Wednesday.
But despite faulty or missing paperwork, the Obama administration allows mortgage companies to boot homeowners from the program, sticking the borrowers with massive bills that often leave them worse off.
During an oversight hearing, Phyllis Caldwell, Treasury's housing rescue chief, acknowledged during questioning that Treasury doesn't know whether mortgage companies and the owners of mortgages are receiving public money under "false pretenses." Treasury is investigating, she said.
The contradiction highlights what many critics of the past two administrations' policies have claimed for some time: they exert overwhelming force when it comes to saving financial institutions, but merely modest assistance when it comes to distressed homeowners.
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Friday, October 29, 2010
Foreclosuregate Explained: Big Banks on the Brink
Truth-Out
Scandal is spreading across Wall St. like a very bad case of poison ivy. A rash of fraudulent home foreclosures has exposed some of the nation's biggest banks to an even worse condition ... bankruptcy.
Until late 2007, the money boys on Wall St. made a bundle in the housing market. After the bubble burst, they were just itching to cash in on the down side, calling in all those bad loans they made and selling off millions of repossessed homes. According to RealtyTrac, Inc., which compiles such data, lenders foreclosed on 3.2 million properties in the last three years, 288,000 in the last quarter, the highest number on record.
But evidence came to light, first in New York, then Florida, Maine, Ohio, and other states that lenders were taking shortcuts to speed up foreclosures. Law firms hired so-called "robo-signers," some of whom have admitted in depositions that they routinely signed off on thousands of foreclosure papers they had never read and sometimes forged signatures of notary publics who were not present.
"Why don't we have Mickey Mouse sign the thing, instead of having a human being sign it? I mean it becomes meaningless," New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Schack told PBS "Newshour."
Legally meaningless maybe, but not without consequence for hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been evicted from their homes, many of whom have no jobs, and who were snookered into sub-prime mortgages in the first place.
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Mortgage Crisis: The Six Trillion Dollar Problem
USA Watchdog
When I was an investigative reporter at the networks, the first question we would ask when trying to decide if we wanted to do a story was: How many? How many people have been hurt by a defective product? How many defective products of a certain kind were in use? How many dollars will it take to fix the problem? In the case of the recent mortgage crisis – “Foreclosuregate,” the question of how many has been answered.It has been widely reported that there are a little more than 60 million home mortgages in the Mortgage Electronic Registry System (MERS). If every one of the 60 million mortgages are worth $100,000, that would mean a total of at least $6 trillion in home mortgages that are electronically filed. In MERS, there is no physical written record of a “Promissory Note.” In almost all states, you need that original “Note” to prove ownership of a home. That means in almost every single state, the banks cannot legally foreclose on your home without this document. Some say the loan documents were lost on purpose because the bankers did not want their massive fraud to see the light of day. Whether or not the “Notes” were lost on purpose or accident, the fact is the original “Notes” are nowhere to be found. That is what the “Robo Signing” part of the story is all about. It has been widely reported that “foreclosure mills” were creating massive amounts of counterfeit Promissory Notes so banks could legally foreclose on homeowners.
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Wednesday, October 27, 2010
TARP Inspector Exposes Fed Secrets to Dylan Ratigan
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