Fannie and Freddie's Foreclosure Barons
How the federal housing agencies—and some of the biggest bailed-out banks—are helping shady lawyers make millions by pushing families out of their homes.
LATE ONE NIGHT IN February 2009, Ariane Ice sat poring over records on the website of Florida's Palm Beach County. She'd been at it for weeks, forsaking sleep to sift through thousands of legal documents. She and her husband, Tom, an attorney, ran a boutique foreclosure defense firm called Ice Legal. (Slogan: "Your home is your castle. Defend it.") Now they were up against one of Florida's biggest foreclosure law firms: Founded by multimillionaire attorney David J. Stern, it controlled one-fifth of the state's booming market in foreclosure-related services. Ice had a strong hunch that Stern's operation was up to something, and that night she found her smoking gun.
It involved something called an "assignment of mortgage," the document that certifies who owns the property and is thus entitled to foreclose on it. Especially these days, the assignment is key evidence in a foreclosure case: With so many loans having been bought, sold, securitized, and traded, establishing who owns the mortgage is hardly a trivial matter. It frequently requires months of sleuthing in order to untangle the web of banks, brokers, and investors, among others. By law, a firm must execute (complete, sign, and notarize) an assignment before attempting to seize somebody's home.
posted by Dictynna @ 7:22 PM
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federal judges, FORECLOSURE MILLS, & Freddie Mac
In Louisiana (and probably in other States), Freddie Mac, Wells Fargo, Federal Court Judges, and Foreclosure Mill lawyers are engaged in various illegal foreclosure activities:
1) Foreclosure mill lawyers file into court records obfuscated money-making pleadings (summary judgments, etc) even when Freddie Mac is NOT party to the lawsuits. In so doing, those lawyers deceptively rake in billable $$$$ under pretext of representing Freddie Mac. Additionally, those mills facilitate use of Freddie Mac’s identity for purposes of causing litigations to become transferred (removed) from state court to federal court, when those lawsuits otherwise would remain in state due to lack of federal subject jurisdiction. Making this farce even worse is unjust “forum-shopped” federal courtrooms of which the federal judges know (it’s impossible to not know) those cases lack federal subject matter.
2) In blatant conflict of interest, some foreclosure mill lawyers obtain for themselves ownership of those properties; and these mills welcome litigation which adds billable fees. After their “simulated” property auctions, some mill lawyers actually bid and take ownership of the properties, and then FLIP the property to Freddie Mac.
3) Wells Fargo (WF) benefits from real estate foreclosure schemes by filing false IRS (“acquisition”) form 1099-A’s, despite that WF never lawfully “acquired” some of those so-called foreclosed properties, which became foreclosed via either defunct mortgage lenders’ names or lenders’ names no longer own those notes. Most foreclosed homeowners are not even aware of the matter of mortgage lenders turning in the names and social security numbers of those property owners to the Internal Revenue via (legitimate as well as non-legitimate) IRS form 1099-A, until they receive those (sometimes fraudulent) LARGE TAX BILLS, which becomes huge problems when foreclosures are in the first place fraudulent.
4) See this foreclosure case filed under defunct Lehman Brothers as owner of the mortgage loan, while Wells Fargo also claimed ownership of that exact loan and sought the insurance proceeds for that Hurricane Katrina damaged property. (There are likely hundreds, thousands of such Katrina insurance incidences!) http://www.lawgrace.org/2008/09/14/lehman-brothers%E2%80%99-mortgage-troubles-nationally-evidence-of-foreclosure-fraud-deception-and-conspiracy-with-wells-fargo-deceptive-judicial-filings/
Foreclosure mills are being unjustly enriched, and lenders and courtrooms are abetting –and sometimes benefitting from these fraudulent foreclosure schemes.
MORE:
Illegal Foreclosures & Evictions, Appalling Lender / Lawyer Abuses...
http://newsblaze.com/story/20091011141440lawg.nb/topstory.html
Lack of Legal Help: One More Way the Deck Is Stacked Against Homeowners
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/lack-of-legal-help-one-mo_b_310353.html
OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA on Foreclosure Crisis
http://www.pr-inside.com/open-letter-to-president-obama-on-foreclosure-crisis-r1505916.html
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