(photo: safari_vacation/flickr)

Now that the 49 State AG settlement has immunized manufacturing evidence, forgery and perjury, it’s going to be a lot tougher to be a judge. After all, how can you ever rule on a motion based upon affidavits and documentary evidence if it’s now OK to lie and to manufacture phony documents?

Will judges need to take courses in document forensics in order to rule on simple motions? Or will courts become even more clogged, because each affiant must be made to appear and confirm their own knowledge of the evidence in their affidavits or even that their own signature appears on the document? Will every motion now necessitate a mini trial?

This settlement corrupts the court system completely. That or it bogs it down to a point where the cost of litigation, no bargain to begin with, will become out of reach of all but the billionaires.

Think about it, if every bit of testimony on every matter, including pre-trial motions, must be had live and in court to avoid perjured and forged documents; the costs of litigation increases by orders of magnitude.

In that case, this settlement screws the banks themselves. Honest judges will no longer be able to accept their motions for Summary Judgment in foreclosure cases and will be forced to make the banks produce the affiants in court to testify from their own knowledge. Since these affiants are usually nowhere near the states where their affidavits are used, the travel costs alone will make the cost of foreclosing on an average house prohibitive.

No, I don’t think the formerly hold out AGs are playing eleventy dimensional chess. They sold out, got played, whatever. Yet most judges didn’t become judges because they wanted to deliberately mete out injustice. Most judges don’t want to give a verdict to a party that lacks standing. Most judges don’t want to see the judicial branch held in the same dismal light as Congress and many of the state legislatures. Read the rest of this entry →

For those of you who thought me paranoid when I said you should demand to see the wet ink original of the mortgage documents when somebody is trying to foreclose on your house; for those of you who thought me a persnickety fussbudget when I said you should demand to see every assignment in the chain from the originator down to the entity that is plaintiff in the foreclosure case against you…

I’m vindicated.

Debbie and Frank Visicaro, a couple in a foreclosure case in Florida, tried to do just that. The judge was evidently rather curt in his treatment of their lawyer and brushed off their entirely lawful application to see the documents proving that the plaintiff had standing to foreclose. Instead he granted summary judgment in the bank’s favor based on an “assignment” from a document mill law firm.

A short time later, the judge asked them to return to court, so he could apologize and reverse his prior decision. Why did he do this? Because in the interim period, he found out that in another two cases two different banks were trying to foreclose first mortgages on the same piece of property.

It gets even better; the signer of the assignments in the two different cases was the same name.

From the transcript:

I’ll give you an example of that. I have one case that was called up for a summary judgment hearing, and I thought it was going to be a typical granted situation, and then a lawyer showed up for the defendant homeowner.

I was beginning to recite to the lawyer what I typically recited, that there were no affidavits in opposition. And the lawyer said, “Well, I thought you might be interested in this,” and handed me some documents that were out of another file in our circuit, and as it turned out, it was the same note and mortgage that was in a separate and independent file.

There was a different plaintiff pursuing a foreclosure proceeding on the same note and mortgage as the one that was being proceeded on. Both the cases contained allegations in the original complaints that the separate plaintiffs were the owners and holders of the note. Both of them had a count to reestablish, and both of them had gone so far as to have affidavits filed in support of a summary judgment whereby an individual represented to the court in the affidavit that the separate plaintiffs had possessed the note and lost the note while it was in their possession.

Interestingly, both affidavits, although they were different plaintiffs, purported the same facts and they were executed by the same individual in alleged capacity as a director of two separate corporations. [emphasis added]

As you can imagine, the judge in the Visicaro case, Judge Anthony Rondolino, is going to be a bit more interested when defense counsel make arguments about Plaintiff’s standing to sue going forward.  And good on Judge Rondolino for his intellectual honesty in correcting this mistake. Read the rest of this entry →

Imagine if you could be in two places at once.  Or three. Or ten. Imagine if you could hold down and perform ten jobs at once. For example, you could be the Vice President or Assistant Secretary (the corporate officer kind, not the typist kind) and six, eight or even ten different financial institutions simultaneously.

How could you do this you might wonder? I wonder, too. Yet, there seems to be an astounding trend in the mortgage foreclosure industry to do just that.

I’m going to send you over to an eye popping report up at FraudDigest [PDF], wherein over 500 mortgage assignments were reviewed to see who was signing them. Please take a minute and read the report; it will blow your mind.

Here are a selection of examples from FraudDigest.com:

JOB TITLES HELD BY KORELL HARP

03-13-2009

Vice President, American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc. as successor-in-interest to Option OneMortgage Corporation

04-09-2009

Vice President, American Brokers Conduit

04-15-2009

Vice President & Asst. Secretary, Argent Mortgage Company, LLC by Citi Residential Lending,Inc., as Attorney in Fact

04-23-2009

Vice President, American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc. as successor-in-interest to Option One Mortgage Corporation

04-29-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

04-30-2009

Vice President, American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc. as successor-in-interest to Option One Mortgage Corporation

05-06-2009

Vice President & Asst. Secretary, Argent Mortgage Company, LLC by Citi Residential Lending, Inc., as Attorney in Fact

05-13-2009

Vice President, American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc. as successor-in-interest to Option One Mortgage Corporation

05-14-2009

Vice President, American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

05-14-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

05-26-2009 & 06-01-2009

Authorized Signer, USAA Federal Savings Bank

06-14-2009, 06-16-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

06-19-2009

Authorized Signer, USAA Federal Savings Bank

06-26-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

07-20-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., acting solely as nominee for

American Home Mortgage

07-27-2009

Vice President, American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc. as successor-in-interest to Option One Mortgage Corporation

Or how about this:

JOB TITLES HELD BY LINDA GREEN

11-11-2004 & 06-22-2006

Vice President, Loan Documentation, Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., successor by merger to Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, Inc.

08-11-2008 & 08-14-2008

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

08-27-2008

Vice President, American Home Mortgage Servicing as successor-in-interest to Option One

Mortgage Corporation

09-19-2008

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Brokers Conduit

09-30-2008

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

09-30-2008

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Brokers Conduit

10-08-2009

Vice President & Asst. Secretary, American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc., as servicer for

Ameriquest Mortgage Corporation

10-16-2008

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

10-17-2008, 11-20-2008

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Brokers Conduit

11-20-2008

Vice President, Option One Mortgage Corporation

12-08-2008

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Brokers Conduit

12-15-2008

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for HLB Mortgage

12-24-2008

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

12-26-2008

Vice President, American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc.

01-13-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for Family Lending Services, Inc.

01-15-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., acting solely as nominee for

American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

02-03-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Brokers Conduit

02-05-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., acting solely as nominee for

American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

02-24-2009

Vice President, American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc. as successor-in-interest to Option One Mortgage Corporation

02-25-2009

Vice President, Bank of America, N.A.

02-27-2009

Vice President, American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc., as successor-in-interest to Option One Mortgage Corporation

03-02-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., acting solely as nominee for

American Home Mortgage

03-04-2009

Vice President, Argent Mortgage Company, LLC by Citi Residential Lending Inc., attorney-in-fact

03-06-2009 & 03-20-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

04-15-2009, 04-17-2009, 04-20-2009

Vice President, Bank of America, N.A.

05-11-2009, 07-06-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

07-14-2009

Vice President, Bank of America, N.A.

07-15-2009

Vice President & Asst. Secretary, American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc., as servicer for

Deutsche Bank National Trust Company, as trustee for, Ameriquest Mortgage Securities, Inc.

asset-backed pass through certificates, series 2004-R7, under the pooling and servicing

agreement dated July 1, 2004

07-30-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

08-12-2009

Vice President, Sand Canyon Corporation f/k/a Option One Mortgage Corporation

08-28-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

09-03-2009

Asst. Vice President, Sand Canyon Corporation formerly known as Option One Mortgage

Corporation

09-03-2009

Asst. Secretary, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., acting solely as nominee for American Home Mortgage

09-04-2009

Asst. Secretary, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., acting solely as nominee for American Home Mortgage

09-08-2009

Vice President, Bank of America, N.A.

09-21-2009 & 09-22-2009

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as nominee for American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

For even more fun you can click here [PDF] and look at the signatures, which even to my layman’s eyes, are clearly written by different hands. Last but not least, go read the deposition testimony [PDF] of one of these serial signers at a document manufacturing mill, who freely admits that she does not even read the documents she is signing.

Please pay attention! They are trying to take your houses away using documents signed by people who have no idea what they are signing and whether any of the information on that document might even be true.

[Earlier posts in this series and related links at Kouril's Foreclosure Fraud Resources]

You know how people like to bandy around the term “mortgage fraud”? Saying that people got “liar’s loans” and bought houses they knew they could not afford and so deserve to be foreclosed upon and evicted?

Those people never talk about predatory lending. They don’t talk about mortgage brokers who encouraged people to take out higher interest rate/no document check loans, who told them if they had trouble making the higher payment when the adjustable rate suddenly shot up in year 3, they could just refinance again and get back to the low teaser rate.

I know, I threw a mortgage broker out of my dining room when he kept trying to talk me out of a fixed rate mortgage and he gave me that exact spiel. People, believing that no bank would be so foolish as to lend to them if the bank did not think they could repay, got loans that they could barely afford at the teaser rate. When the loans reset, they could not make the payments, and defaults began, this set off a wider financial panic and then people lost their jobs, so even more loans defaulted and housing prices plummeted.

Many, many people are now underwater in their mortgages and cannot refinance. And Congress and FOX want to blame it on homeowners. They don’t want to blame it on predatory lending.

Now foreclosures are happening at an astounding rate. I was filing a motion in court on Long Island a month or so ago and I overheard the clerks talking about the new special mortgage foreclosure court. They were getting around 40 filings a DAY.

There are specialty foreclosure parts in most, if not all, of the counties in NY now.  I know other states have special “land courts” to handle these kinds of cases. The idea is for the judges to develop expertise in the minutia of foreclosure and land recordation.

And it’s paying off. In a case where the demoralized homeowner did not even put up a fight and defaulted on a motion by the bank to foreclose upon her home, Justice Schack, in Deutsche Bank v Harris, observed that the person signing claiming to be an employee of MERS was the same person signing claiming to be an employee of the Bank. And that the Bank, MERS, and INDYMAC all claimed the same suite of offices in California to be their principal place of business. There are more cases just like this, and not just in NYS.

Now comes the revelation, that is a pool of names of individuals who have signed documents under oath, claiming to have assigned mortgages into various pools and trust under circumstances not credible on their face. Basically these individuals, and more cases are being identified every day, are claiming to Vice Presidents of multiple banks and other mortgage related entities, all at the same time. In reality, they appear to be low level clerks at a company called DOCX. Take a minute and go read this report and then for even more fun, go look at actual examples of these titles and signatures.

What does this mean? It means that banks, and the companies that they used to warehouse and process the mortgage documents backing their securities, either knowingly or negligently mishandled the documents and failed to actually transfer them into the trusts that back those securities. They acted as if they had. All would have gone well except that homeowners began to default and when the trusts went to foreclose, they found out that they don’t actually have the mortgages in their trusts. So, to cover it up, it appears that these document mills are fabricating missing documents, backdating documents, and doing assignments of documents after the time to lodge those documents in the trusts has long expired. In other words, they are committing fraud to cover up the fact that they failed to “perfect” their ability to foreclose.

Congress may be blind, deaf and dumb to the families needlessly made homeless, most prosecutors may be wringing their hands not knowing what to do—this latter part amazes me b/c you would think an ambitious prosecutor would love to become a populist hero by riding to the rescue of beleaguered homeowners—but, at least, bankruptcy judges and mortgage part and land court judges —perhaps because they are seeing so many boiler plate filings—have begun to smell the coffee.

[Earlier posts in this series and related links at Kouril's Foreclosure Fraud Resources]