The irrefutable logic at the foundation of all successful foreclosure defense narratives

The mortgage lien is designed to protect against financial loss — not to promote financial gain. If Wall Street wants to protect the financial gains it created from its crazy scheme using weapons of mass financial destruction, then the least it should do is share a little of that with homeowners, consumers, the government, and investors. 
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I continually get the same question, mostly because neither the homeowner nor the “investigators” understand anything about being a licensed, educated, experienced investment banker, lawyer, or accountant. If they were any of those, they would not ask the question.
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The latest question was whether the discharge in bankruptcy helps.
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The discharge in bankruptcy does not interfere with the ability to enforce the lien if the lien is valid — and the enforcer is a creditor who maintains an unpaid loan account receivable due from the homeowner on the ledgers of that creditor. I think the lien is invalid because it did not secure an underlying obligation created by the original transaction.
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The original transaction consisted of an incentive payment paid to or on behalf of the homeowner in exchange for the issuance of documents that created the illusion of a loan transaction.
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Thereafter, no party treated the transaction as a loan, nor did any party claim ownership of an unpaid loan account on their accounting ledgers. But documents were filed in support of fraudulent claims for foreclosure remedies that appeared to be facially valid, raising the presumption that the loan account existed.
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I think the problem is that people can’t wrap their heads around one idea. The transaction they signed into was not a loan. If there is no lender, creditor or loan account, there cannot be a loan that is recognized in our legal system, nor should there be.
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If there is no loan, no loan account, nor any creditor sitting with an accounting ledger on which they report the acquisition of an obligation due from you, you don’t owe the money to them. If no such creditor exists, you don’t owe the money at all.
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The mortgage lien is designed to protect against financial loss — not to promote financial gain. If Wall Street wants to protect the financial gains it created from its crazy scheme using weapons of mass financial destruction, then the least it should do is share a little of that with homeowners, consumers, the government, and investors.
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We are so trained to believe that we are not entitled to profit from Wall Street schemes designed to defraud us that we refuse to accept the profit even when it is sitting on a golden plate in front of us.
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If homeowners were to withhold payments (that are not legally due anyway) en masse, it would force Wall Street to do the right thing: reform all the transactions to reflect the economic realities, to wit: share the bounty with the keystone participants — homeowners who issue the documents that form the foundation of the sale of securities that are unrelated to the illusion of any sale of an underlying obligation.

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To be sure, there would need to be substantial changes in the law governing consent and compensation, in addition to the existing laws requiring full disclosure of all financial transactions producing revenue from the stroke of a homeowner’s pen. That can be done if we want to do it. Until then, homeowners will continue to win their cases in small numbers without truly understanding why or how they won.
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Nobody paid me to write this. I am self-funded, supported only by donations. My mission is to stop foreclosures and other collection efforts against homeowners and consumers without proof of loss. If you want to support this effort please click on this link and donate as much as you feel you can afford.

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Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 75, is a Florida licensed trial and appellate attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business, accounting and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.
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FORECLOSURE DEFENSE IS NOT SIMPLE. THERE IS NO GUARANTEE OF A FAVORABLE RESULT. THE COMMENTS ON THIS BLOG AND ELSEWHERE ARE BASED ON THE ABILITY OF A HOMEOWNER TO WIN THE CASE NOT MERELY SETTLE IT. OTHER LAWYERS HAVE STRATEGIES DIRECTED AT SETTLEMENT OR MODIFICATION. THE FORECLOSURE MILLS WILL DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO WEAR YOU DOWN AND UNDERMINE YOUR CONFIDENCE. ALL EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT NO MEANINGFUL SETTLEMENT OCCURS UNTIL THE 11TH HOUR OF LITIGATION.

But challenging the “servicers” and other claimants before they seek enforcement can delay action by them for as much as 14 years or more. In addition, although currently rare, it can also result in your homestead being free and clear of any mortgage lien that you contested. (No Guarantee).

Yes you DO need a lawyer.
If you wish to retain me as a legal consultant please write to me at neilfgarfield@hotmail.com.

Please visit www.lendinglies.com for more information.

Notices To and From Servicer Might Mean Nothing at All

In homeowner finance, ALL claims start with notices from third parties with whom the homeowner has previously had no communication. My suggestion is that homeowners start challenging those letters, statements, and notices as soon as they arrive. Such challenges make “tracks in the sand” for later use in litigation.

But the real issue arises repeatedly because the condition precedent to foreclosure about which there is no dispute is that first there must be a declaration of default. And in the world of securitization, there is no creditor, loan account, or any loss or ven risk of loss arising from a homeowner failing or refusing to make a scheduled payment.

A declaration of default usually comes from a disinterested third party who does not represent an existing creditor who maintains an unpaid loan account receivable on its accounting ledgers reflecting real-world transactions in which it paid value. The equivalent legal value of that is you sending a notice of default to your neighbor when you figure out he or she did not make a payment to the utility company. The notice was sent but it has no legal effect. it is called a legal nullity.

So the question arises about what happens when you send a QWRT or DIVL to the company that was named as a servicer. the first thing that comes to mind for me, is that merely sending the QWR or DVL might be construed as a tacit admission that the company really is a servicer.

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This logically leads to the presupposition that since it is a servicer it is really performing real servicing duties. And that logically leads to the factual conclusion that it is legally and rightfully acting on behalf of a true creditor. And since a true creditor obviously loses money when a homeowner does not make a scheduled payment, it follows that the default can and should be issued.

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The problem with this analysis is that it leads inexorably to the conclusion that you should not respond to fakers. But since the players are claiming rights of administration, collection, and enforcement, they DO appear to fall under protections for consumers relating to those activities. But that still leaves open the issue of whether the named “servicer” is the only one who should receive the DVL and QWR.

That is the question I answered as follows:

Theoretically notice to the servicer is a notice to all under the regulations. The problem is that the company named as a servicer does not do the servicing. That is one of the subjects that is never discussed.

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The company named as servicer probably does have some apparent agency or other authority to present the named Trustee of the REMIC trust. But since that trustee never has the right, power, justification or excuse to administer any affairs regarding the alleged loan account (which does not exist) giving them notice arguably is a failure to give notice to anyone who is real party interest. But it IS notice to everyone who is engaged in apparent debt collection activity even if there is no debt.

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So sending the QWR to all who are “interested” (in a conspiracy to defraud) is probably a good way to go. The real problem is that the laws do not cover this scenario. A legal question is whether the extensive protections for consumers even apply to a company whose name is being used (with consent) to simply put a face on a scheme in which money is illegally collected without any right, justification or excuse? Anyone receiving the QWR is basically put on notice that they may be part of a future lawsuit.
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The countervailing argument is that some of the proceeds are eventually used to pay off some of the money due to investors (the rest coming from sales of new certificates). But that argument fails because the investors who became “holders” of certificates are merely the payee on an IOU issued by an investment bank in a transaction wherein the investors waive any right, title, or interest to any homeowner payment, debt, note, or mortgage.
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The bottom line for all this is whether there can be any legal collection activity without a creditor, a loan account or any risk of loss. Even the investors get paid the debt from the investment banker regardless of whether or not a homeowner misses a scheduled payment.
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Nobody paid me to write this. I am self-funded, supported only by donations. My mission is to stop foreclosures and other collection efforts against homeowners and consumers without proof of loss. If you want to support this effort please click on this link and donate as much as you feel you can afford.

Please Donate to Support Neil Garfield’s Efforts to Stop Foreclosure Fraud.
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Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 75, is a Florida licensed trial and appellate attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business, accounting and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.
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Click Here for Preliminary Document Review (PDR) [Basic, Plus, Premium) includes 30 minute recorded CONSULT). Includes title search under PDR Plus and PDR Premium.

Click here for Administrative Strategy ANALYSIS AND NARRATIVE. This could be all you need to preserve your objections and defenses to administration, collection or enforcement of your obligation. Suggestions for discovery demands are included.
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FORECLOSURE DEFENSE IS NOT SIMPLE. THERE IS NO GUARANTEE OF A FAVORABLE RESULT. THE COMMENTS ON THIS BLOG AND ELSEWHERE ARE BASED ON THE ABILITY OF A HOMEOWNER TO WIN THE CASE NOT MERELY SETTLE IT. OTHER LAWYERS HAVE STRATEGIES DIRECTED AT SETTLEMENT OR MODIFICATION. THE FORECLOSURE MILLS WILL DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO WEAR YOU DOWN AND UNDERMINE YOUR CONFIDENCE. ALL EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT NO MEANINGFUL SETTLEMENT OCCURS UNTIL THE 11TH HOUR OF LITIGATION.

But challenging the “servicers” and other claimants before they seek enforcement can delay action by them for as much as 12 years or more. In addition, although currently rare, it can also result in your homestead being free and clear of any mortgage lien that you contested. (No Guarantee).

Yes you DO need a lawyer.
If you wish to retain me as a legal consultant please write to me at neilfgarfield@hotmail.com.

Please visit www.lendinglies.com for more information.

Use of QWR and DVL is extremely important in counteracting the tracks laid down by securitization that fake a contractual relationship with the homeowner

If you are not willing to challenge the basic assumptions of the loan or debt, then you probably should not even start any challenge or defense. If you are willing to do that you will probably win or force the “dark side” into a settlement that you find favorable to your interests.

You don’t need to understand how the debt vanished. You only need to know that if you challenge its existence and therefore its owner and agents, the dark side will fail.

The inability of consumers to understand the securitization process is not a legal excuse for preying on them.

The inability of lawyers and jduges to understand the securitization process is not a crime. It simply means they must be convinced.

The existence of the process of securitization and the use of that label is not a legal or accounting substitute for transactions in which value was paid for the purchase of loans in shares distributed to investors.

  • No sale of loan=No securitization.
  • No Securitization=No creditor.
  • No creditor=No servicer. 
  • No servicer=No accounting records
  • No accounting records=No case against homeowners. 

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According to the rules and regulations, service or notice to one of the parties involved in “servicing” is service or notice to all. But if you want to establish the foundation for later enforcement by the homeowner it is a good idea to serve notice on everyone you know, or anyone uncovered by the forensic investigation.

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ADMINISTRATIVE STRATEGY: Most people view the FDCPA and RESPA as useless and most people raise challenges to fake creditors in which they lose the case. It is a good idea to send a QWR and DVL to everyone you know is involved in the attempts to establish claims, rights, title, or interest in the administration, collection, or enforcement of alleged obligations.
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In that letter, one should specify that according to information supplied by them [either in the public domain or in correspondence and notices directly to you] the functions they identify are clearly within the definition of a servicer and are probably aiding in the process of debt collection as that term is defined.
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THEN go on to say that the money you have paid appears to have been misdirected by or on behalf of the recipient of the QWR/DVL.
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If possible you want to cite the fact that the only party that appears to be named as a creditor disclaims any knowledge of the content, existence, or administration of any unpaid loan account receivable owed by you.
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Hence it is fair to assume that they (the named creditor) are not receiving money nor making distributions to “investors.” If that is true then they have no right or authority to appoint any agent over any obligation owed by you, if any exists.
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Hence the first question is a request for a description of your functional role in the processing, administration, and enforcement of any alleged obligation owed by me and an identification of the party(ies) on whose behalf you engage in such activities or functions.
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You are writing therefore to validate the existence of a loan account receivable, the identity of the owner of that account and to validate the payment and/or receipt by that entity of money paid by you on that account.  Further, you are writing to validate that money paid by you has been paid by the company named as “servicer” or whether such payments are transmitted by some other person or entity.
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These are the tracks in the sand that counteract the tracks made by the securitization players immediately after every “closing.” Without those tracks, your defenses and challenges appear to be hail mary passes. With them, you can show any court that they have repeatedly stonewalled any questions about the existence of the debt they say they are trying to collect and the existence of any authority to collect it.
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You don’t owe money to anyone who claims it just because you issued a note and mortgage. It can ONLY be an obligation owed to a creditor who can be identified. You don’t owe money at all if the loan account doesn’t exist.
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Through the process of legal reformation in the courts, a loan account might be created and it might not. But until that account exists, there is nothing to pay and there is no creditor to pay because a “creditor” can ONLY be a person or entity that owns and maintains an unpaid account receivable owed by you.
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The fact that the investment banks who control this scheme did not credit a loan account is no excuse in and of itself for the failure to create that loan account and then credit it with money received on account of that.
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Their choice to substitute a sham “servicer” who performs no services or functions relating to receipt or disbursement of money does not excuse them from compliance with laws, precedent, and standards that have evolved over centuries of legal jurisprudence. And the inability of consumers to understand the securitization process is not a legal excuse for preying on them.
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Nobody paid me to write this. I am self-funded, supported only by donations. My mission is to stop foreclosures and other collection efforts against homeowners and consumers without proof of loss. If you want to support this effort please click on this link and donate as much as you feel you can afford.
Please Donate to Support Neil Garfield’s Efforts to Stop Foreclosure Fraud.

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Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 75, is a Florida licensed trial and appellate attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business, accounting and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.
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CLICK HERE TO ORDER ADMINISTRATIVE STRATEGY, ANALYSIS AND NARRATIVE. This could be all you need to preserve your objections and defenses to administration, collection or enforcement of your obligation. Suggestions for discovery demands are included.
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FORECLOSURE DEFENSE IS NOT SIMPLE. THERE IS NO GUARANTEE OF A FAVORABLE RESULT. THE FORECLOSURE MILLS WILL DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO WEAR YOU DOWN AND UNDERMINE YOUR CONFIDENCE. ALL EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT NO MEANINGFUL SETTLEMENT OCCURS UNTIL THE 11TH HOUR OF LITIGATION.
  • But challenging the “servicers” and other claimants before they seek enforcement can delay action by them for as much as 12 years or more.
  • Yes you DO need a lawyer.
  • If you wish to retain me as a legal consultant please write to me at neilfgarfield@hotmail.com.

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Getting a piece of the pie: How securitization can work FOR homeowners and not against them

There is no sale of the obligation, note or mortgage and so there is no securitization of debt. By splitting the attributes of behavior from the provisions of the executed documents and changing the description of the behavior, an investment bank could, in essence, sell the apparent debt an unlimited number of times without ever recording the sale of the debt, note or mortgage.

  • In most instances, the “closing” of a transaction with a homeowner results in the issuance of a note and mortgage promising payment that is not supported by any reciprocal consideration. In most of the other cases, the “closing” results in very little money paid by or on behalf of the homeowner despite what is stated on the settlement statement, which is a lie.

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Like everything in the world of securitization, you need to split the hairs. “Title” to the mortgage does not mean “ownership” of the mortgage, but the two terms are generally conflated as meaning the same thing. Any party that is the last party to receive an assignment of mortgage is the “owner” of “title” to that lien. There is no reasonable debate that can occur with respect to that black letter statement.

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And any owner of “title” to the mortgage (note the difference between title to the mortgage and title to the property) has the right to enforce that lien according to the terms of the instrument that was properly executed and recorded. But that right to enforce is subject to several statutory and common law restrictions.
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First common law for centuries holds that no transfer of a mortgage is valid, even if it is properly executed and recorded, if there is no concurrent transfer of ownership of the underlying obligation. This distinguishes the legal treatment of mortgages from other instruments like promissory notes.
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This is further reflected in the statutes of all U.S. jurisdictions that require the would-be enforcer to have paid value for the underlying obligation. Adoption of 9-203 UCC. And please note that, as the investment banks figured out, it is possible to pay value without paying the value for the underlying obligation and it is possible to have paid value for the mortgage lien without paying for and receiving ownership of the underlying obligation — especially if the parties intended it. (See “splitting”).
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In fact, splitting hairs further, it is possible to pay value for future behavior of humans relative to the provisions of written instruments without ever buying the obligation, note or mortgage. This is exactly what occurred in the current iteration of “securitization” of debt. There is no sale of the obligation, note or mortgage and so there is no securitization of debt.
  • By splitting the attributes of behavior from the provisions of the executed documents and changing the description of the behavior, an investment bank could, in essence, sell the apparent debt an unlimited number of times without ever recording the sale of the debt, note, or mortgage on any accounting ledger —even while such “sales” are reported and recorded in the public domain. 
  • In so doing the investment banks turned accounting on its head. And the big accounting firms let them do it — along with Federal agencies who knew better.
  • No legal document is valid unless it relates to something that actually occurred or is expected to occur in the real world.
  • The absence of any accounting ledger containing any unpaid loan account receivable due from the homeowner is proof of the absence of the debt — at least without court reformation of the entire transaction. 
  • The single biggest mistake of homeowners and lawyers is the failure to recognize these basic facts. As a result, even judges who are skeptical of the claim MUST conclude that the unpaid loan account receivable exists and that it is owed to the claimant who has experienced a default (financial loss) because they either said it or implied it through counsel who is protected by litigation immunity. 
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In terms of selling securities, regulated or unregulated, this was the holy grail of investment banking. Selling securities without ever having to turn over the proceeds of securities sales to a genuine issuer. They merely had to invent a name under which the securities were issued and then sell them. This could be done indefinitely with the same homeowner transaction or group of homeowner transactions. The group would be called a “pool” implying ownership but that label was misleading since nobody owned the underlying obligation — thus undermining the right to enforce the terms of the mortgage.
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The problem with this Wall Street strategy is that none of the securities issued by them are enforceable against or even currently relevant to the homeowner (according to the investment banks and their lawyers). The benefit is obvious. they can sell the transaction multiple times, calling it a “loan,” without ever recording the sale of the debt. But enforcement of the debt is entirely dependent upon the existence of an unpaid loan account receivable under current law. Since no such account exists under the current iteration of “securitization” the investment banks were required to fake it.
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They needed to manage to convince judges that a designee or nominee had the right to enforce even though it had no such right. They needed to do that because without enforcement, the label of “loan” would be exposed as fake. And the sales pitch to investors regarding the apparent (but never promised) ownership of a pool of loans would also be revealed as fake, thus undermining the principal goal of the entire scheme — the same of more securities (“certificates”). If transactions with homeowners were revealed to be something other than “standard loans” then the certificates would become unmarketable.
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As a consequence, events occurred on an epic scale that were incomprehensible to the casual observer. The investment banks did not have an unpaid loan account receivable to point to as a reference so they created the presumption of one. By inserting a “servicer”  who appeared to be processing the receipts and disbursements, they used the printed reports allegedly from the”servicer” to constitute a “payment history”.
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They then, through counsel, convinced judges to accept the “payment history” as a legal substitute for evidence of the loan account receivable. The absence of any evidence of actual receipt of payments or disbursement to a “creditor” has been overlooked by courts for twenty years.
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Thus far nearly all homeowners and most of the lawyers who are rarely employed to investigate the matter to render an opinion, have failed to understand this process precisely because there is no analog in their lives or education or experience.
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But for the few homeowners who challenge the premise that there is any outstanding unpaid loan account receivable, they usually succeed at trial or they are paid off in confidential settlements. The challenge to homeowners and their attorneys is to start at the first premise at the earliest possible time because the investment banks, acting through lawyers who have litigation immunity, are building a track record of correspondence and notices starting with the origination of the homeowner transaction.
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Thus by the time the matter gets to court, most homeowners have done nothing and their defenses look like last-minute hail Mary passes to avoid the “inevitable” foreclosures. 96% of all homeowners faced with false claims of rights to administer, collect or enforce the nonexistent loan account receivable simply leave or even clean up the property before leaving peaceably. In so doing they are leaving behind the extremely valuable property that has no effective lien on it other than the recording of a mortgage that was either invalid, to begin with, or became ineffective because there was no debt.
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In addition, homeowners are leaving a claim behind that also has high value and which the investment banks are always concerned about. The original transaction was in most cases without any fundamental element of a loan transaction other than the homeowners’ desire to obtain a loan. Except in the earliest transactions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, nearly all such transactions were steered toward a feeder of a common investment bank.
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Thus the appearance of payments made on behalf of the homeowner at “closing” was an illusion. The investment bank simply used two different originators. Other than cash-out refi’s no money at all was required except to pay all the intermediaries who played the parts of lenders, servicers, closing agents, real estate agents, mortgage brokers, title companies, etc. But each new “transaction” was the base or foundation for a new round of creation, issuance, sale, and trading of new certificates. The investment banks were literally printing money — or cash equivalents.
  • In most instances, the “closing” of a transaction with a homeowner results in the issuance of a note and mortgage promising payment that is not supported by any reciprocal consideration. In most of the other cases, the “closing” results in very little money paid by or on behalf of the homeowner despite what is stated on the settlement statement, which is a lie.
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By all standards and statutes, the fact that the transaction with the homeowner would not have taken place but for the sale of securities was required to be disclosed to the homeowner. And the claim that the transaction was a loan required the investment bank, acting through its many intermediaries and conduits, to disclose the true nature of the transactions and the compensation, bonuses, commissions, and profits that would be generated from securities sales. (TILA).
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The entire securities scheme was entirely dependent upon the homeowner signing papers that would be used to create an extra-legal virtual creditor (illegal) with an extra-legal (illegal) virtual loan account receivable rather than the legally required real creditor with a real loan account receivable. Homeowners never received the loan product they were requesting and they were never told about the valuable service they were performing for the investment banks. And therefore they never had an opportunity to bargain for a share of the venture into which they were being lured as the principal issuer of instruments that made the scheme possible.
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Thus each day, homeowners, believing that they received what they requested, are walking away from property that is legally owned by them free from the enforcement of the mortgage lien that is being used to chase them out. Each foreclosure results in new financial proceeds that are used to pay various intermediaries and conduits (including law firms and “Servicers”) with the investment banks retaining the balance. Although this cash flow should be categorized as revenue it is untaxed inasmuch as it is reported (or unreported) as the return of capital.
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There is nothing in this piece that is unknown to the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the FTC, the SEC, or the Department of the Treasury. In the words of Timothy Geithner, attempting to justify the payment to banks rather than the bailout of homeowners, “The plane was on fire. We had to land the plane somewhere.”
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For proof of this narrative look no further than The TARP program and the many cases that have been won by homeowners. In all cases where the homeowner won, it was based upon a finding by the trial judge that the claimant had not produced sufficient evidence to back up its claim—- i.e., that it had an unpaid loan account receivable.
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But TARP is more instructive. First, it was announced that it was intended to cover losses from defaulting “loans.” Then Federal officials came to realize that the banks were not holding any loans. That produced some head-scratching. If there were no losses on “loans” then why did the banks need a bailout? Then Wall Street came up with a different scenario closer to the truth but still a lie — the “losses” were from the certificates (RMBS) that were issued. The same problem emerged. Investment banks were not buying certificates, they were selling them.
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But Wall Street was banging the drums for a bailout anyway. They had no losses but they wanted a vehicle by which they could stiff investors and settle for pennies on the dollar. And they wanted the proceeds of hedge bets and insurance they had purchased gambling on the collapse of the “market” (completely controlled by the investment banks) for the certificates.
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And so was born the Maiden Lane entities and the payments to AIG etc that resulted in companies like Goldman Sachs receiving tens of billions of dollars on a bet that they had made that the certificates they were creating would fail — a bet that was guaranteed by the tranche system. This could only work if “loans” were closed that could not possibly survive more than a few months or years. Wall Street banks thus encouraged the NINJA “loans” with “no documents” etc. It was a bid for a crash.
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The data on the highest quality “loans” were placed in the highest tranche but that tranche (under the control of the investment bank) bought “credit default swaps” that were disguised purchases of the data relating to the lowest tranche that contained data on the “loans” that were virtually guaranteed to fail.
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Insurers would not insure the lowest tranche. It was too obvious that the loan data would be reported as non-performing in the near or middle term. So the investment banks asked for insurance on the highest tranche and then created the scenario in which when the lowest tranche failed it took down the highest one thus triggering tens of billions in profits payable not to investors but to the investment banks. And such payments were not credited to the unpaid loan accounts receivable for any homeowner because no such account existed.
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And to think that all this occurred on the backs of homeowners who failed to receive a single disclosure for the existence of the securities scheme that completely changed the character of the transaction that they requested and that they reasonably believed they had received.
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So here is the remedy— from the law books — that ought to apply if you stop believing in the threats of armageddon regularly issued by the investment banks. Like Iceland and others, use court process to force the reformation of the homeowner contract to include the securitization portion of the deal, compensating the homeowner reasonably for the share of revenue that the homeowner should have received and compensation for the additional risks in dealing with counterparties who had no stake in the outcome of the transaction or who even had a negative stake in the outcome (If it failed, they win).

Magna Bank, N.A. as Trustee for registered holders of certificates issued under the name of the Macandcheese Acquisition Trust, Inc. an inactive corporation, for a nonexistent trust, series 2022-XL-1

So a friend of mine left her phone in my car. Here is what I wrote to her:

Thank you for leaving your phone in my possession, which as you know is 9/10s of the law. That means that even though you paid for it and you received ownership from the seller, I can now claim it as my property. So by possessing the phone I was able to issue and sell several certificates based upon the possible rental income I would receive from you for access to the phone you already own.

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I told the buyers you had scheduled payments of $100 per month, even though you had neitehr signed nor even acknoweldged any agreeemtn to make the scheduled payments on the nonexistent obligaiton.
I told the investors that I would make quarterly payments to them equal to 5% of their investments in perpetuity. I will be able to make those payments as long as I am able to continue selling certificates either on your deal or other deals with other ignorant consumers. If you don’t make the payment I will have the option of withholding part or all of the payments I promised to the investors. If you do make payments on this nonexistent obligation, that will make it easier for me to pay bonuses to everyone involved in this scheme.
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So far I have received $2500 from these investors and my salesmen are just getting started. I am returning the phone to you in exchange for a signed receipt that refers to a document that is referenced as describing the scheduled payments. If you don’t make the payment I will repossess the phone and get a judgment against you for the balance due under the lease, which is $15,000. If you wish to modify this obligation you will need to admit to a default and we might then offer a “modification” in which you agree that the deal is valid.

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Servicing of this nonexistent account has been assigned to financial technology (FINTECH) companies who will communicate with you using the name of Joe’s Screw and Die Company (JSDC). The FINTECH companies will assert aqht JSDC is your new servicer ven thouhg it performs no functions.
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The FINTECH companies will publish and send to account statements and payment histories under the letterhead of JSDC. Your telephone communications and correspondence will be forwarded to a call center or correspondence center operated by Black Knight Rising, Inc. who works for me.
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If you ask any questions or if a legal action is initiated to collect on this nonexistent obligation the creditor will be named as Magna Bank, N.A. as Trustee for registered holders of certificates issued under the name of the Macandcheese Acquisition Trust, Inc. an inactive corporation, for a nonexistent trust, series 2022-XL-1.
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And no, I will not reveal the identity of the holders of those certificates nor the content of the certificates. Not ever. But I will instruct lawyers to imply — but not directly state — that the action is brought on behalf of investors or a trust and that it doesn’t make any difference whihc one.
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Despite the fact that you never signed any document that memorializes any agreement by you to these specific arrangements I assure you I can and will enforce the nonexistent obligation against you — because I can.
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Reports concerning your credit status will be sent under cover of the name JSDC to the Credit Reporting Agencies. My name won’t be mentioned so if you ever prove that the report was false, it will be difficult if not impossible for you to attribute liability to me. You will get a judgment against JSDC which is a thinly capitalized entity designed to go bankrupt in the event that many people like you start winning in court.
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Failure to make scheduled payments on this nonexistent obligation will result in increased expenses incurred by you for use of credit in the future in addition to loss of your phone, and a judgment against you that is presumptively valid once it is entered in any court record in a court of competent jurisdiction.
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Should you choose to contest this claim you will most likely win — but only if you are willing to spend considerable time, money and energy in doing so, while negative credit reports are issued against you. Thus even though the claim is false and based upon illegal and possibly criminal premises, you might as well pay.
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Although you might consider this arrangement to be theft, based upon coercion and intimidation, we call it free-market capitalism. Thanks to tens of millions of consumers just like you I now have a private jet, and palatial estates in 14 countries. I am also a very large contributor to philanthropic causes, and a prolofic collector of mastperpiece artworks — which gives me great credibility in the press, even though I am a common thief.
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On a final note, you might ask whether you could or should be a participant in this scheme receiving some of the prodigious revenue from sales of certificates or even some revenue from other consumers like you. While we recognize that the entire scheme is dependent upon the existence of your phone and the receipt you sign to get it back, the answer is no, we will not share in the revenue.
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Just to be clear, I am not your creditor. I neither own nor maintain any accounting record on which data entries are made at or near the time of any financial transction with you and neither does JSDC. However because anyone can sue for anything, I will continue to assert nonexistent authority to collect money from you.
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As further clarification, when I have generated more than the stated lease balance of $15,000 you will neither be notified of that fact nor relieved of any pressure to continue paying. You will not be able to prove that the revenues      generated exceeded any amount asserted as your obligation because there is no such record keeping track of that.
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And in an abundance of caution let me clearly state that you have no debt or obligation owed to me or anyone else under this arrangement. Any payment you make is purely voluntary and without any impediment to your ability to access professional advice which you probably won’t use. What is wonderful for me is that even if you did go to a lawyer or other professional (except perhaps a diligent accountant) they most likely would not understand this deal even if they read this email. Such professionals might ask you questions like “well, you got the phone didn’t you?”
P.S. My friend won’t return my calls now.

How Could This Not Be a Loan?

if the investment bank paid the homeowner as an incentive payment rather than as a loan, then there is no debt any more than salary or wages can later be called a loan. The fact that the consumer/homeowner thought or even wished it were otherwise makes no diffeerence. If I pay you money and you think it is a loan but I paid you for services you rendered, the substance of the transction is “fee for services” — not a loan — and there is no legal or ethical or moral obligation to pay it back. 

I think the one idea that sticks in the throat of nearly everyone is the idea that no money was loaned. That idea seems impossible and to many skeptics, it sounds like a snake-oil salesman trying to peddle what people want to hear. People know that they did really buy their home, and the majority of these transactions are refinancing, which means that the old “lender” got paid off, right?

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First of all, let’s agree on at least one thing. Virtually all installment payment agreements are now subject to claims of “securitization.” This means that behind every transaction is an investment bank that is arranging payments, only where necessary, and who is receiving the proceeds of consumer payments plus all of the revenue and profits from the sale and training of unregulated securities.
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If there is one thing missing from most articles analyzing consumer debt, it is the failure to recognize that a handful of investment banks are the center of all of those transactions and they all have reciprocal agreements. Those agreements are mostly in writing but difficult to obtain, and sometimes tacit. You don’t need to look any further than any pooling and servicing agreement to see the world’s largest banks all participating in the same venture. In prior years, this fact alone would’ve been sufficient for antitrust action.

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So here is my effort at explaining it. There are several categories of transactions that occur with homeowners.
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  1.  The homeowner is buying a new home from a developer or contractor.
  2.  The homeowner is buying a home from the existing homeowner.
  3.  The homeowner is buying a home from a party or business entity that asserts ownership after foreclosure on the previous homeowner.
  4. The homeowner is refinancing the new home they purchased from a developer or contractor.
  5. The homeowner is refinancing a home they bought from a prior homeowner.
  6. The homeowner is refinancing a home they bought from a foreclosure buyer.
  7. The homeowner refinances by entering into a forbearance agreement.
  8. The homeowner refinances by entering into a modification agreement.
  9.  Securitization of data and attributes of homeowner’s promise to make scheduled payments — no relevant transaction because there was no sale of the underlying obligation, legal debt, note or mortgage (or deed of trust). Since law requires that sale for enforcement by successors, the foreclosure players fake the documents.
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Let’s define our terms.
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“Homeowner” means in this case someone who is looking to buy a home or who is looking to change their transaction.
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“Refinance” means that the homeowner is a party to some transaction and/or documentation that changes the terms of the homeowner’s prior promise to make scheduled payments.
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“Money source” means the investment bank that (a) borrowed money from a third party bank like Credit Suisse, (b) used the borrowed funds to make payments to or on behalf of the homeowner. (It pays back the loan to its lender (and co-underwriter of certificates) through sales of certificates to investors promising scheduled payments, without maturity, collateral, or a guarantee of payment.)
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1. PURCHASE OF NEW HOME FROM DEVELOPER: generally speaking, this is the only transaction that is in substance but it appears to be in form. Money is actually paid to the developer.
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  • The money trail for this transaction looks something like this: LENDER—>MONEY SOURCE/INVESTMENT BANK—>SUBSIDIARY OR CONTROLLED AFFILIATE OF MONEY SOURCE—>CLOSING AGENT—>DEVELOPER.
  • The paper trail (i.e. contracts) for this transaction looks something like this: MONEY SOURCE/INVESTMENT BANK—>AGGREGATOR (like Countrywide Home Loans)—>(a) Assignment and Assumption Agreement with Originators (like Quicken Loans) and (b) Indemnification Agreement with title insurers—>Mortgage Broker—>Mortgage salesman—>Homeowner execution of promise to pay and collateral for making scheduled payments to Originators.
  • Bottom Line: The homeowner is getting money, courtesy of an investment bank that is NOT intending to make a loan or be governed by any lending laws.
    • The homeowner is making a promise to pay the originator who did not lend any money or make any payments to or on behalf of the homeowner.
    • The only party identified as a lender is the originator who did not make a loan.
    • The only party that arranged for payment disclaims any role of being a lender.
    • The payment made on the homeowner’s behalf was an incentive payment designed to procure the signature of the homeowner on a note and mortgage (or deed of trust).
      • Legally since there was no lending intent by either the named “lender” or the Money Source, there is either no contract at all or no loan, since there was no meeting of the minds.
      • If the transaction is not rescinded the deal needs to be reformed with a court determining what incentive payment the homeowner should have received from the scheme to issue, sell and trade unregulated securities.
      • But if the homeowner tacitly or expressly asserts or agrees or admits it was a loan, then for all purposes in court, it will be treated as a loan not subject to reformation.
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2. PURCHASE OF NEW HOME FROM PRIOR HOMEOWNER: generally speaking most of these transactions do not result in the payment of money to any prior lender. But the excess due to the seller is paid in the same way that money is paid where the homeowner purchases a home from a developer.
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  • Most of such transactions are steered to originators and aggregators who represent the money source (investment bank) who was involved in the financial transaction with the prior homeowner.
  • Because the proceeds of the “new financing” or “purchase money mortgage” would be paid to the same investment bank, no money exchanges hands with respect to the “pay off” of the prior note and mortgage.
  • The confusing point for most lawyers and homeowners is that there is nothing illegal about a bank holding a prior mortgage lien. There is nothing illegal about the same bank doing business with the next owner. And there is nothing illegal about the bank not issuing a check to itself when the owners change.
    • But that is not what is happening. “The bank” does not exist. The money source (investment bank) is not carrying the homeowner’s promise to pay scheduled payments as an asset and therefore is not “the bank.”
    • For legal purposes, the test is simply whether or not the investment bank has suffered a loss as a result of the refusal or failure of the homeowner to make a scheduled payment.
    • Or, phrased differently, the question from the beginning is whether or not the investment bank has the source of money ever excepted any risk of loss arising from the value of a loan account receivable.
    • The answer to both questions is in the negative. In dozens of cases across the country, lawyers have been asked to identify the creditor and have admitted that they cannot do so.
    • The only logical conclusion is that the transaction was never intended to be a loan (with the exception of the homeowner who did intend to get a loan, but did not receive it).
    • The investment banks wanted the homeowner to believe they were getting a loan instead of an incentive payment to execute a promise to make scheduled payments. They did not want the homeowner to know that they were receiving an incentive payment. Disclosure of that fact is an absolute requirement under the law. If they had disclosed the true nature of the transaction, they would have been subject to bargaining and competition.
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3. PURCHASE OF NEW HOME FROM FORECLOSURE BUYER: generally speaking, relative to any current financing arrangement, no money exchanges hands on these deals because and substance, the foreclosure buyer generally is receiving some sort of protection or indemnification from a title company that has been to issue insurance on a transaction that cannot pass the test of marketability or clear title — mostly because of the above factors. The anecdotal evidence on thousands of cases reviewed by me strongly indicates that nearly every foreclosure buyer is in substance a placeholder or nominee for the investment bank. By flipping the paper title, the foreclosure buyer receives a “profit” that is in substance a fee for legitimizing the foreclosure. That profit or fee is funded by the investment bank.
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4. REFINANCING: generally speaking, all transactions that carry the label of “refinancing” are false transactions. Because securitization does not involve the purchase and sale of any underlying obligation, legal debt, note, or mortgage, each such transaction represents a new opportunity to create a new securitization infrastructure using the same transaction. Investment banks use every means of their disposal to encourage “refinancing” since it is the source of most of their new sales of certificates. The only money paid out is the excess, after fees, over the amount previously declared as “principal.” But this “principal” is not carried on the accounting ledger of any company or any person as an asset, nor is there any reserve for bad debt (simply because there is no risk of loss).
  • Forbearance is a form of “refinancing” because it accomplishes a number of things for the investment bank. First, obtain a signature from the homeowner that ratified or admits that the previous paperwork and financial transactions were all valid. Second, it essentially removes the placeholder originator from the paper trail. Third, it installs a new placeholder name and obtains consent from the homeowner. Fourth, it establishes a company claimed to be the servicer as the legitimate recipient of funds or proceeds from homeowner payments or the sale or foreclosure of the collateral (i.e., the home).
  • Modification is the same as forbearance: It introduces new parties under coercion. Homeowners sign these documents with total strangers mostly out of sheer panic. What they’re doing is waiving rights and creating tracks in the sand that are opposite to their financial interest and well-being.
Given all of that, many people ask me why I have consented or approved of a homeowner entering into a new agreement with players who are conducting an illegal scheme. The answer is simple and the investment bankers know the answer: they have the money to make a homeowner’s life miserable and they are not subjected to vigorous enforcement by regulators and law enforcement.
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The entire burden of resisting this massive scheme of “Financial weapons of mass destruction” Falls on each homeowner, one at a time. It takes considerable time, money, and resources to resist.
So when the opportunity comes to settle the matter on favorable terms that reduce the payment, interest rate, and principal, and the homeowner lacks the will or the resources to resist, the only choice left is to settle with the perpetrators who put them in a bad position and who are cheating each homeowner out of their rightful share of the securitizations scheme.
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Nobody paid me to write this. I am self-funded, supported only by donations. My mission is to stop foreclosures and other collection efforts against homeowners and consumers without proof of loss. If you want to support this effort please click on this link and donate as much as you feel you can afford.
Please Donate to Support Neil Garfield’s Efforts to Stop Foreclosure Fraud.

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Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 74, is a Florida licensed trial and appellate attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business, accounting and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.
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CLICK HERE TO ORDER ADMINISTRATIVE STRATEGY, ANALYSIS AND NARRATIVE. This could be all you need to preserve your objections and defenses to administration, collection or enforcement of your obligation. Suggestions for discovery demands are included.
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FORECLOSURE DEFENSE IS NOT SIMPLE. THERE IS NO GUARANTEE OF A FAVORABLE RESULT. THE FORECLOSURE MILLS WILL DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO WEAR YOU DOWN AND UNDERMINE YOUR CONFIDENCE. ALL EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT NO MEANINGFUL SETTLEMENT OCCURS UNTIL THE 11TH HOUR OF LITIGATION.
  • But challenging the “servicers” and other claimants before they seek enforcement can delay action by them for as much as 12 years or more.
  • Yes you DO need a lawyer.
  • If you wish to retain me as a legal consultant please write to me at neilfgarfield@hotmail.com.
Please visit www.lendinglies.com for more information.

Tonight! Neil Garfield makes it simple: Lying for Dollars: How to Apply Your Understanding of Securitization Claims to Win

Thursdays LIVE! Click into the Neil Garfield Show

Tonight’s Show Hosted by Neil Garfield, Esq.

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“Your Honor, this is a standard foreclosure.” That is the first lie told in court as lawyers, and companies claiming to be servicers, lenders, or trustees continue to play their game of lying for dollars.

It’s obvious I have not simplified the explanation enough because both lawyers and homeowners still mostly don’t understand what I am talking about. That means they can’t use it effectively, as I have, and that means the judge won’t have any idea what you are talking about.

You can prove that the documents used by your opposition can’t be trusted. More importantly, you can prove that the lawyers opposing you cannot be trusted. And that means the opposition must prove their case by reference in well-founded relevant testimony from competent witnesses as to the actual transaction, proof of payment, etc. And they can’t do that.

That is how I win. And that is how homeowners across the country have won. And that is how all homeowners are faced with false claims of securitization or false claims of ownership where there is MERS or other signs of claimed securitization in the background.

So let me take a stab at another type of explanation of what happened. I concede that it is difficult for anyone to comprehend including Wall Street investment bankers. This will be the show tonight — my attempt at simplifying the explanation of why homeowners should win every time.

This will be an oversimplification. It is an example of the progression of events that occur when a legitimate loan is claimed to be subject to what is called securitization.

You must be tenacious, persistent, and unrelenting to the point where you can clearly demonstrate that the opposition is not complying with either court rules or court orders. That is when you have them in your sights and can shoot down their claim.

Attack the “Successors”

In analyzing the paperwork in front of you, make sure you read every word and do not accept anything said at face value. A popular ruse by foreclosure mills is the use of the word “successor.” I have been saying that this word is used as a cover-up for “we don’t have title to the debt, note or mortgage.” That means they have no loss connected with a claimed scheduled payment that was not received by a “Servicer” who had no right to receive it in the first place.

Hat tip to Gary Dubin, Esq. and Shelley Erickson.

If they have no loss, they have no claim. You don’t have a claim payable to you if you simply know that your neighbor has skipped a payment to someone. You don’t have the right to declare a default. There could be numerous reasons why the payments stopped that are none of your business. In that scenario, any action undertaken as if you did have the claim would be illegal in both the criminal and civil arenas. Such actions would include notice of substitution of trustee, a notice of default, a notice of sale, summons and complaint, etc. The practical problem is that the longer you wait to contest such actions, the more it seems like the perpetrator does have a claim.

Very often, you will see “Successor” used when it makes no sense if you even give it a moment’s thought. For example, if U.S. Bank is recited as successor to Bank of America, that is literally impossible. U.S. Bank did not buy, acquire or purchase Bank of America. They are referring, of course, to the “sale” of the position of “trustee” (without any legal trust powers) from Bank of America to U.S. Bank after Bank of America acquired LaSalle Bank, which is after LaSalle Bank had been effectively acquired by the owners of ABN AMRO, who had merged with Citi.

The key question is whether the position of a trustee if it actually exists, could ever be sold by the trustee without the advice and consent of the beneficiaries and/or the trustor/settlor. Of course, if that was alleged, i.e., that U.S. Bank had acquired the rights to be trustee through purchase, it would then need to disclose the content of the agreement of purchase and sale, and that alone would involve showing the consent of beneficiaries.

Because of the erroneous assumption/presumption that the beneficiaries of a REMIC trust are the investors, it is assumed that they must have consented. But the real beneficiaries are shown in the actual trust agreement (not the PSA most of which is a statement of future intention and not past events).

The real beneficiaries are securities brokerage firms (“investment banks”) which would, in turn, reveal that the investment banks are the primary parties in control of administration, collection, and enforcement — despite the fact that the investment banks retained no financial stake in the outcome of any transaction that was labeled as a loan.

People ask me whether there are cases supporting my analysis. there are hundreds of them, but they are rarely reviewed, much less used, by any homeowner or lawyer. Here is one such example from 2019 that has never been overruled, citing many other cases:

Certo v. Bank of N.Y. Mellon, 268 So. 3d 901, 903 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2019) (“On the other hand, it is insufficient for the plaintiff to rely on its acquisition of the other entity. See Fielding v. PNC Bank Nat’l Ass’n , 239 So.3d 140, 142-43 (Fla. 5th DCA 2018) ; Kyser v. Bank of Am., N.A. , 186 So.3d 58, 61 (Fla. 1st DCA 2016) (despite testimony of merger, witness gave no testimony as to what assets exactly were acquired); Fiorito v. JP Morgan Chase Bank, Nat’l Ass’n , 174 So.3d 519, 520-21 (Fla. 4th DCA 2015) (testimony one entity “took over” another is not sufficient); Lamb v. Nationstar Mortg., LLC , 174 So.3d 1039, 1041 (Fla. 4th DCA 2015) (listing cases). Similarly, listing party status as “successor by merger” or claiming a title is not sufficient; a plaintiff must support its claim by evidence. See Buckingham v. Bank of Am., N.A. , 230 So.3d 923, 924-25 (Fla. 2d DCA 2017) (holding words “successor by merger” were insufficient to “establish the merger, let alone that the [plaintiff] acquired all of [the successor’s] assets”); DiGiovanni v. Deutsche Bank Nat’l Trust Co. , 226 So.3d 984, 988-89 (Fla. 2d DCA 2017) (finding no standing where Deutsche presented no evidence “Bankers Trust had been renamed Deutsche Bank”); Murray v. HSBC Bank USA , 157 So.3d 355, 358-59 (Fla. 4th DCA 2015) (explaining “Option One California” was not “Option One Mortgage Corporation”); Verizzo v. Bank of N.Y. , 28 So.3d 976, 977, 978 (Fla. 2d DCA 2010) (explaining plaintiff listing itself as “successor trustee” was insufficient).”)

Certo v. Bank of N.Y. Mellon, 268 So. 3d 901, 903 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2019) (“The trouble here, similar to the trouble in Conley , is Mellon’s link to Bank of NY and Bank of NY’s link to JP Morgan. Because the final special indorsement is to JP Morgan, Mellon needed to evidence how it obtained the Note or interest. It claims to have it because Bank of NY is a successor to JP Morgan and Mellon is the new Bank of NY. However, the record does not establish either of those necessary links.”)

The bottom line here is that there is no succession regardless of how many times they assert it. Attacking the pleadings, motions, and exhibits with your own motions, answers, affirmative defenses and potential counterclaims is probably a good tactical response to the assertion of this type of lie perpetrators use in the courts every day. Bernie Madoff got away with his Ponzi scheme for decades. It was in most ways identical to what the investment banks have done with what they called “residential lending.”
The banks called it “securitization” without ever selling a single loan to investors or any part thereof. Madoff called it options trading without ever trading a single option. It was all based upon the “hidden magic” and “genius” of some secret formula that nobody else could access. Compare it yourself. Madoff’s scheme, now exposed, reveals what was really happening with homeowner transactions, investor transactions, and “foreclosures” of nonexistent claims.
THE BIG QUESTION IS WHERE ARE THE REGULATORS? THEY MISSED IT WITH MADOFF DESPITE CLEAR SIGNS OF WRONGDOING AND THEY ARE DOING IT AGAIN WITH INVESTMENT BANKS TOUTING NONEXISTENT SECURITIZATION.
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Nobody paid me to write this. I am self-funded, supported only by donations. My mission is to stop foreclosures and other collection efforts against homeowners and consumers without proof of loss. If you want to support this effort please click on this link and donate as much as you feel you can afford.
Please Donate to Support Neil Garfield’s Efforts to Stop Foreclosure Fraud.

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Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 73, is a Florida licensed trial and appellate attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.
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CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION FORM. It is free, with no obligation and we keep all information private. The information you provide is not used for any purpose except for providing services you order or request from us. In  the meanwhile you can order any of the following:
CLICK HERE ORDER ADMINISTRATIVE STRATEGY, ANALYSIS AND NARRATIVE. This could be all you need to preserve your objections and defenses to administration, collection or enforcement of your obligation. Suggestions for discovery demands are included.
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CLICK HERE TO ORDER TERA – not necessary if you order PDR PREMIUM.
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CLICK HERE TO ORDER CONSULT (not necessary if you order PDR)
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CLICK HERE TO ORDER PRELIMINARY DOCUMENT REVIEW (PDR) (PDR PLUS or BASIC includes 30 minute recorded CONSULT)
FORECLOSURE DEFENSE IS NOT SIMPLE. THERE IS NO GUARANTEE OF A FAVORABLE RESULT. THE FORECLOSURE MILLS WILL DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO WEAR YOU DOWN AND UNDERMINE YOUR CONFIDENCE. ALL EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT NO MEANINGFUL SETTLEMENT OCCURS UNTIL THE 11TH HOUR OF LITIGATION.
  • But challenging the “servicers” and other claimants before they seek enforcement can delay action by them for as much as 12 years or more.
  • Yes you DO need a lawyer.
  • If you wish to retain me as a legal consultant please write to me at neilfgarfield@hotmail.com.
Please visit www.lendinglies.com for more information.

TONIGHT! Why Lawyers Should Want Foreclosure Defense Cases and What They Are Missing $$$

Thursdays LIVE! Click into the Neil Garfield Show

Tonight’s Show Hosted by Neil Garfield, Esq.

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This show is devoted to convincing the lawyers who will listen that they are missing out on something very profitable and important. Representing homeowners faced with foreclosure papers can and does present an opportunity for large paydays, consistent victories in court, and playing a part in changing the trajectory of home finance in this country and around the world.

In 2008 I presented a seminar that provided the essentials of foreclosure defense as we knew them at that time. We repeated it several times in different parts of the country. In that seminar, I also presented a business plan for lawyers to do it. It was the hub and spoke plan that allowed homeowners to pay monthly based upon the known length of time that any foreclosure would last.  About a dozen lawyers followed my instructions and made millions of dollars.

It’s time for a new push.

What Happened With Your “Loan” — By admitting that you received a loan you lose.

The plain truth is that homeowners are losing their cases through assymetry of information. They think they understand when they do not have a clue. They are admitting the obvious, which turns out to wholly untrue. In so doing they give the court no choice but to enter judgment aganst them. 

ApplicationForLoanProcessAndFundingOfServiceFees

I am experimenting with new ways to present this. If you click on the above chart you will see that the application process is actually a dead end. Nobody actually agrees to lend any money. Nobody does lend money.

Money arrives later at the “closing” table but unknown to the borrower it is not a loan. Contrary to popular belief which is based on ignorance of the actual process, no loan is sold. No obligation is sold. Nobody ever becomes the owner of any loan or obligation. Nobody records a purchase of any loan obligation. And nobody maintains any loan account receivable.

Whether it is described as a loan broker or “loan originator” (for which there is no legal definition) it is there for the fees. It is not present to participate in any loan nor does it receive any profit from making a loan. It does not share in any profit from making a loan because there is no loan. There is no lender. Calling it a lender does not make it a lender.

But you can reverse that (and lose your case) by calling it a lender in your conversations, pleadings, motions, memoranda or argument in court.

  • As soon as you have done that, for purposes of that case, you have admitted the existence of the loan.
  • In so doing you have tacitly admitted that the loan broker or the originator was the lender.
  • In admitting that there was a lender you have identified the lender as the loan broker or originator.
  • By doing that you have admitted that the originator had ownership of the underlying obligation.
  • By admitting that, you have admitted that the originator or broker paid the money that appeared at the “closing table.”
  • By admitting that you have also admitted that the lender — or its “successor” — suffered an actual economic loss that was proximately caused by the “nonpayment” of the homeowner.
  • And so by admitting that you have admitted that the action for foreclosure is valid.

Just a word about “successors.” You will often find the word used. Sometimes “MERS and its successors.” Sometimes “MERS for XYZ and its successors.” A successor is a company who has purchased the obligation or who has purchased the company that owned the obligation. In residential transactions, there is almost no instance where such an event has occurred.

There are no successors. There are no companies even willing to pose as successors unless they are sham conduits — thinly capitalized to be thrown under the bus or thrown into bankruptcy. The way this is done is clever. Sometimes the sham is actually just a trade name masquerading as a company or a “trust.”

Trusts do not exist for legal purposes unless there is something of value entrusted to a person or company for purposes of administering that thing (res, in Latin) for the benefit of beneficiaries.

The place where many lawyers get hung up on that is that there exists an “allonge” or assignment of mortgage” or “assignment of beneficial interest” to, for example, U.S. Bank, as trustee for ABC-2006 certificates.

If you dig deep enough in discovery just under the surface you will find a “trust agreement.” The trust agreement never grants any powers to the administration of any affairs to the named trustee.  So U.S. Bank is actually prohibited from doing anything with the paper that is assigned to it. In fact, you will find that it lacks the right, power, or duty to even ask what is happening in “the trust.” So labeling it as trustee is merely window dressing and does not describe any trust relationship or position. But you can change all that and lose the case simply by your own reference to U.S. Bank as a trustee, which in turn admits the existence of a trust etc.

Note that the paper “entrusted” to the trustee is not for benefit of investors who, by the ay, are not beneficiaries of the trust. the securities broker is the beneficiary. And note also that the paper transfer of an interest in a mortgage is a legal nullity in all jurisdictions unless there is a contemporaneous transfer of ownership of the underlying obligation. This is further amplified by Article 9 §203 UCC, adopted in all US jurisdictions, that requires payment of value as a condition precedent for filing any foreclosure action.

Please also take notice of the fact that the purported delivery of the original note is mostly fiction since the original note was most likely destroyed shortly after the “Closing.” But even if delivery of the original note is deemed to have occurred, the possessor is neither a holder nor anyone else entitled to enforce it unless they received a delivery from someone who owned the underlying obligation or note.

This is where the Wall Street brokers have snookered the courts, the lawyers, and even homeowners themselves. A holder is someone who has possession and has the right to enforce. The case for foreclosure fails on this point unless, here it is again, the homeowner admits delivery or fails to contest it and allows the assumption of authority to enforce to operate without rebutting that presumption through discovery.

So when U.S. Bank or Bank of New York Mellon says it is appearing “not on its own behalf” you should take them at their word. They have no interest. Treating them as though they do have an interest only leads to the same series of conclusions described above causing the court of law to conclude that your defenses are both technical and dilatory. You have already admitted the case against you — so why are fighting it? That isn’t bias. It is the standard operating procedure. Courts are not exhibiting bias when they do that. They are following orders based upon centuries of legal precedent and statutes.

I have many followers who are adhering to the untenable notion that the courts are acting out of bias or even malice. They are not — even when the judge appears irritated. You must get off that tack which will gain you nothing and lead nowhere and get on board with a defense that actually does work, based on the facts and existing law. Getting angry with me for saying that homeowners are losing their cases rather than “banks” winning the case is a failure to recognize the fact that few people are able to make sense out of the process called “securitization” — a process that never actually happened in residential transactions with homeowners.

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Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 73, is a Florida licensed trial and appellate attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.
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  • But challenging the “servicers” and other claimants before they seek enforcement can delay action by them for as much as 12 years or more.
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Repurchase agreements only advance the myth that loans were purchased in the first place.

Investors would do much better if they stopped litigating the duty to enforce repurchase agreements. The repurchase agreement is void because there was no purchase. There are better claims to make that are more easily proven.

Homeowner litigants need to have more courage and attack the existence and ownership of the underlying alleged obligation much more explicitly and directly. They will be pleasantly surprised. While they will never get an admission that the whole affair is a scam, they will be able to raise the inference and thus limit the evidence in court that would ordinarily be allowed to prove the existence, ownership, and enforceability of what the claimant says is an unpaid debt. The key to winning any defense narrative is establishing insufficiency of the evidence.

As I stated in 2006 on TV, radio and articles published in many news outlets, both homeowners and investors should get on the same page. This was a sham. Investors probably can become creditors if they ask the court for a declaration of rights and maybe even appointment of a receiver. The debtors would be the Wall Street firms and possibly even homeowners — although not to the full extent of the purported obligation to repay the compensation paid to homeowners for assuming concealed risks.

see https://www.nationalmortgagenews.com/opinion/will-cmbs-litigation-be-the-new-rmbs-litigation

This is how the legal system became twisted beyond recognition in dealing with claims arising from investors, homeowners, and GSEs. There was a faulty and totally erroneous assumption (in most cases) that there was ANYTHING to buy or sell.

Wall Street banks have successfully relied upon complexity to force everyone else to rely on a single source for explanation of the falsely proclaimed “securitization” process. That single source is Wall Street. As long as we are only getting our information from the perpetrators of this financial terrorism we will be paralyzed.

Now this is spilling over to commercial transactions where some securitization actually happened. As between banks it was called “syndication” of loans, but when they get outside investors to take a piece then it is called “securitization” because each investor gets some paper document proclaiming them to be the owner of part of the loan debt, note, and mortgage.

That never happened with residential loans. No investor ever purchased a share of any loan. No Wall Street securities brokerage firm (aka “investment bank”) ever established, maintained or sold any homeowner obligation. But the Wall Street firms did pretend to sell the note and mortgage, albeit without any conveyance of the alleged underlying obligation.

A paper transfer of an asset is evidence of transfer, but it is not the actual transfer. So homeowners can ask for proof of payment of value for the underlying obligation (see Article 9 §203 UCC) to rebut the appearance of a transfer. A transfer of a mortgage without transfer of the underlying obligation is a legal nullity in all 50 states, as it should be.

And unless Wall Street wants to tell us that such transfers were gifts, then those “purchases” were never completed because there was no payment of value one exchange for a conveyance of ownership of the alleged underlying obligation. This is one of the finer points that Wall Street is exploiting. They may point to the movement of money or value — but that movement did not result in a transaction in which an owner of the obligation (i.e.e someone who paid for it) was paid value for the obligation and executed a transfer document “for value received.”

Of course, the underlying obligation had been extinguished contemporaneously with the origination or acquisition of the obligation — because nobody wanted to be left holding the bag. Any entry on the accounting ledger of any entity that established the obligation as an asset purchased for value would make that entity liable for violations of lending laws. And nobody wanted to suffer a real loss if the homeowner failed to make scheduled payments to pay off a nonexistent debt.

So nobody wanted to own any debt from homeowners. And they didn’t need to own anything. The securities scheme was not securitization of any homeowner debt. It was a much larger scheme that used homeowner transactions only as an outside reference point for data reporting in the sole discretion of Wall Street firms who were the bookrunners in each scheme.

The securities were bets — not evidence of ownership of anything. The sale and trading of such securities, combined with insurance and hedge contracts produced so much money that the homeowner transaction became irrelevant excepts as a reference point for data. So everyone got paid in full and then some. Nobody needed to own any homeowner obligation and the fact that they didn’t own the obligation would not stop them from pursuing enforcement despite the lack of ownership.

In order to really sell an asset, you must own it. In order to own it you must pay for it. In order to transfer ownership of the asset, you must transfer the actual asset not just a piece of paper that talks about the asset. It is possible that some payment of value exchanged hands in which there was a reference to both residential and commercial loans. But in residential transactions with homeowners, it is mostly NOT possible that any underlying obligation was transferred (even if it appears to have been “sold”).

So “repurchase agreements” for bad loans were in fact a misnomer and perpetuated the myth that securitization of residential loans actually occurred. Litigation over rights that do not exist is a farce. But that is exactly where the courts are stuck. This is not a failing of the courts. It is the failure of litigants to bring the true facts to the court’s attention.

This failure arises from the lack of understanding of the process that Wall Street is calling “securitization.”

Litigants need to have more courage and attack the existence and ownership of the underlying alleged obligation much more explicitly and directly. They will be pleasantly surprised. While they will never get an admission that the whole affair is a scam, they will be able to raise the inference and thus limit the evidence in court that would ordinarily be allowed to prove the existence, ownership, and enforceability of what the claimant says is an unpaid debt. The key to winning any defense narrative is establishing the insufficiency of the evidence.

*
Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 73, is a Florida licensed trial and appellate attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.
*

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FORECLOSURE DEFENSE IS NOT SIMPLE. THERE IS NO GUARANTEE OF A FAVORABLE RESULT. THE FORECLOSURE MILLS WILL DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO WEAR YOU DOWN AND UNDERMINE YOUR CONFIDENCE. ALL EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT NO MEANINGFUL SETTLEMENT OCCURS UNTIL THE 11TH HOUR OF LITIGATION.
  • But challenging the “servicers” and other claimants before they seek enforcement can delay action by them for as much as 12 years or more.
  • Yes you DO need a lawyer.
  • If you wish to retain me as a legal consultant please write to me at neilfgarfield@hotmail.com.
*
Please visit www.lendinglies.com for more information.

 

Think You Have a Loan? Think Again! Don’t allow the Wall Street “investment banks” to steal back money that was earned by homeowners. 

What is obvious is false but only investment bankers know it. 

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Without knowing it, you are probably doing business with a Wall Street securities brokerage firm calling itself an “investment bank.” You didn’t know because they were never disclosed. And the money they paid to you was not a loan — at least not for them it wasn’t. They didn’t treat it that way on their own records and neither should you. That means they are attempting to collect back the money they paid to you even though it wasn’t a loan.
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So what did they pay you for? When you issued the promissory note what were you buying?
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The plain truth is that without an extensive background in investment banking — and all the experience, training, and education that requires — you have no way of understanding the nature of the transaction. So I’m breaking it down into its simplest components here — useful for litigation but not a complete description.
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You asked for and thought you received a loan. After all, you did get the money, didn’t you? When you applied for a loan, you thought you had identified the lender with whom you were doing business. After all, the money came after you signed the “closing documents”, right? So when the judge asked if you received the loan, you say “yes” believing there is no way you could deny the “obvious.
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And that is how Wall Street has been winning for 20 years. What is obvious is false but only investment bankers know it. 
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Here is what you didn’t know (in nearly all cases):
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  1. Yes, you asked for a loan, but the application you submitted was not to a lender.
  2. Contrary to the laws governing loan transactions many things were not disclosed to you.
  3. In most cases, the intake for the application for a “loan” is performed by a loan broker, who doesn’t care what the transaction is called as long as he/she gets the commission.
  4. The loan broker gets paid if you sign the closing documents. By signing the promissory note you have created an obligation — but is it enforceable? The answer is yes if it really was a loan transaction.
  5. The loan broker then forwards the information on the “loan” application to an IT platform that is controlled by a third party platform which in turn is acting for a securities firm preparing to issue and sell securities to investors. As far as they’re concerned they would prefer to pay you $1 rather than $200,000. But then how could they get you to sign a note for $200,000?
  6. The securities that are issued and sold are not a conveyance of any interest in your transaction. They are bets based upon reports issued by the securities firm. The prices of those securities are unrelated to the total amount of your transaction or any part of your transaction. So they can sell these securities indefinitely until the market is saturated (no more demand).
  7. On average, the dollar volume of revenue generated by the securities firm selling the securities is $12 for each $1 of your transaction.
  8. The amount they paid you was, therefore, on average, around 8.5% of the total revenue. It was a commission, not a loan. But you didn’t know that.
  9. You received a payment that was dressed up as a loan. You never thought to bargain for reasonable compensation for entering into a transaction that was the keystone of all the sales of all of the securities. And you never thought about whether you wanted to be part of a business venture whose purpose was to sell betting rights based upon reports about your transaction and whether you were making scheduled payments.
  10. Collection and enforcement of the obligation you created when you executed the promissory note is the act of taking back the commission they paid to you. And because they want all of it back plus interest that leaves you with negative compensation for initiating a huge business venture and allowing the use of your name and reputation. (They get all the benefits, you get the shaft).
  11. And even at the point of collection and enforcement you still don’t know that you are actually dealing with a securities firm that has no financial interest in your transaction. You don’t know because nobody is telling you that. They insist on calling it a loan and since it looks like a loan, everyone (including you) thinks it is a loan.
  12. When they get money from you or from the sale of your property they have no place to put it. They can’t debit an account receivable that reflects ownership of your obligation because there is no account receivable on the ledger of any company. Your payments constitute a return of the commission they paid to you — an amount that they deemed reasonable. That means that their payment is evidence of the amount of commission to the homeowner that the securities firm deemed reasonable. Ask any lawyer what that could mean.
  13. In court, they seek to increase their profits by forcing the sale of your house. But that can only be done legally if the forced sale is granted by a court because the action is a foreclosure. But it isn’t a foreclosure if the claimant is not the owner of your obligation. And they can’t be the owner of your obligation unless they paid value for it — which is why there would be an entry on the accounting ledgers of some company if anyone paid for your obligation and received a conveyance of ownership of your obligation. 
  14. In every loan, there is the lender and a borrower. You intended to be a borrower but you never made the journey. The biggest problem in foreclosure defense is the fact that homeowners and their lawyers (and the judges before whom they appear) believe that you did make the journey.
  15. That is because your counterpart was not a lender, had no means or intention of being a lender, and was seeking to avoid being called a lender at all costs — because they didn’t want to be held responsible for violations of the Federal Truth in Lending Act and other federal and state law governing lending, collections, and enforcement.
  16. The borrower has every legal right and legal expectation that the party representing itself as a lender is doing the underwriting of a loan with due diligence. That means they have a stake in the outcome of the transaction. It if its a loan, their revenue, profit, and assets are dependent upon repayment of the ”loan.” 
  17. In most cases, your transaction was conducted by the securities firm acting through sham conduit intermediaries. The sole purpose was to start the sale of securities. Some of those securities were bets against the performance data of your loan.
  18. So they had an incentive and a vested interest in seeing your “obligation” fail. That is why they inflated appraisals, granted no doc loans, granted NINJA loans, and offered “teaser” terms that were guaranteed to fail when the scheduled payments were reset.  The securities brokerage firm was betting on a sure thing. 
  19. In addition, the riskier the loan the higher the interest they could charge. That’s because everyone (except the Wall Street firm) thought it was a loan. And the higher the interest the less they had to pay out from the fund of capital generated by selling securities to investors. So if you had a $200,000 transaction where the securities brokerage firm set a price of 10% “interest,”  they were receiving around $400,000 from investors to cover that “loan” (which was actually a commission). That is why there is no loan account receivable on the books of anyone — not even the securities brokerage firm that funded it out of investor capital.
  20. Everyone on the “securitization” team got paid without exception. There is no debt.

So here is the message to homeowners, lawyers, regulators, law enforcement, and lawmakers:

Don’t allow the Wall Street “investment banks” to steal back money that was earned by homeowners. 

*
Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 73, is a Florida licensed trial and appellate attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.
*

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FORECLOSURE DEFENSE IS NOT SIMPLE. THERE IS NO GUARANTEE OF A FAVORABLE RESULT. THE FORECLOSURE MILLS WILL DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO WEAR YOU DOWN AND UNDERMINE YOUR CONFIDENCE. ALL EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT NO MEANINGFUL SETTLEMENT OCCURS UNTIL THE 11TH HOUR OF LITIGATION.
  • But challenging the “servicers” and other claimants before they seek enforcement can delay action by them for as much as 12 years or more.
  • Yes you DO need a lawyer.
  • If you wish to retain me as a legal consultant please write to me at neilfgarfield@hotmail.com.
*
Please visit www.lendinglies.com for more information.

Sometimes the client figures it out better than the lawyer

The problem has always been how to present this counterintuitive reality to a judge who is convinced that securitization of a loan DID occur even though the transaction was not in fact a loan and no sale occurred.

After decades of litigating and teaching litigation, the one common theme throughout my career has been the knowledge that often your best ideas come from the client, who is unencumbered by thoughts of what can’t be done.

One such client of mine in the state of Hawaii asked a simple question. She asked whether the homeowner, post-foreclosure, could ask for surplus funds. Surplus funds are defined by statute to mean that once the debt is paid including all expenses of enforcement, the remainder of the proceeds of a forced sale of the property should be returned to the homeowner. This is basic law applied in all jurisdictions. The “lender” does not get a bonus — at least not legally.

So that sparked some thought and analysis. If the claim was based on a nonexistent loss, then the entire proceeds of the sale should be turned over to the homeowner. In addition,  the filing of a motion or petition for accounting for the money proceeds from the sale could reveal the nonexistence of the implied loss and the nonexistent claim. That, in turn, could lead to a claim for sanctions or damages for filing a frivolous lawsuit. And that might all be included in a petition for declaratory, injunctive, and supplemental relief in which the court is asked to declare fee title, unencumbered, vested in the homeowner.

In any event, procedurally, the demand for an accounting followed by a motion to enforce the demand seems appropriate and should send the foreclosure mill spiraling. You see, the money never goes to the named claimant where the alleged claim was based upon securitization of the debt — because the loan, debt, note, and mortgage were never securitized. (Securitization means breaking up an asset into component parts that are sold to investors in pro-rata shares. Such sales never occurred. Securities were sold but they did not represent an ownership interest in any asset.)

The problem has always been how to present this counterintuitive reality to a judge who is convinced that securitization of a loan DID occur even though the transaction was not in fact a loan and no sale occurred.

The answer might be, in addition to the defensive strategies suggested on these pages, that instead of an appeal you file a motion to compel an accounting and a motion to open limited discovery on the accounting. The motion is actually a motion to compel the return of surplus cash generated from the sale of the property. Of course, that might need to wait until the sale to a third party but there are good arguments for filing it when the credit bid is offered by the named claimant.

Thus far, the banks have been selling property and then depositing the cash into an account controlled by a concealed investment bank notwithstanding the naming of the sham conduit claimant in whose name the foreclosure process was started. Frequent sleight of hand name changes occurs post-judgment or even post-sale.

It is difficult to imagine any court denying the request for the return of excess funds. Obviously, the argument from the foreclosure mill would be something like this: “The loss has already been established as the law of the case and the sale price was less than the loss, so there is no surplus.” But that argument flies in the face of current judicial doctrine which holds that even in a default situation you must still prove the damages.

And once the court is convinced you to have a right to see what happened to the money, it is difficult to imagine that the court would not order the foreclosure mill to produce the accounting. Like a request for identification of the creditor and the loan account receivable, such orders will be ignored because they must be ignored — even at the expense of sanctions. And the reason is quite obvious after reviewing thousands of cases — there is no loan account, there is no loss and there is no creditor despite all appearances to the contrary.

So if they file a false accounting they are probably committing or suborning perjury. And I don’t think many people are willing to sign such documents for any amount of money unless they don’t value their freedom.

The interesting thing about procedural rules is that the judge is more than happy to apply them if they can get rid of the case. In this case, a motion for sanctions for failure to comply with the homeowner’s request and the judge’s order will most likely produce either a direct win for the homeowner or a very satisfactory settlement — albeit with someone who had no right to settle with you.

*
Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 73, is a Florida licensed trial and appellate attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.
*

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*
CLICK HERE ORDER ADMINISTRATIVE STRATEGY, ANALYSIS, AND NARRATIVE. This could be all you need to preserve your objections and defenses to administration, collection or enforcement of your obligation. Suggestions for discovery demands are included.
*
CLICK HERE TO ORDER TERA – not necessary if you order PDR PREMIUM.
*
CLICK HERE TO ORDER CONSULT (not necessary if you order PDR)
*
*
CLICK HERE TO ORDER PRELIMINARY DOCUMENT REVIEW (PDR) (PDR PLUS or BASIC includes 30 minute recorded CONSULT)
*
FORECLOSURE DEFENSE IS NOT SIMPLE. THERE IS NO GUARANTEE OF A FAVORABLE RESULT. THE FORECLOSURE MILLS WILL DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO WEAR YOU DOWN AND UNDERMINE YOUR CONFIDENCE. ALL EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT NO MEANINGFUL SETTLEMENT OCCURS UNTIL THE 11TH HOUR OF LITIGATION.
  • But challenging the “servicers” and other claimants before they seek enforcement can delay action by them for as much as 12 years or more.
  • Yes you DO need a lawyer.
  • If you wish to retain me as a legal consultant please write to me at neilfgarfield@hotmail.com.
*
Please visit www.lendinglies.com for more information.

How and Why to Litigate Foreclosure and Eviction Defenses

Wall Street Transactions with Homeowners Are Not Loans

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I think the biggest problem for people understanding the strategies that I have set forth on this blog is that they don’t understand the underlying principles. It simply is incomprehensible to most people how they could get a “loan” and then not owe it. It is even more incomprehensible that there could be no creditor that could enforce any alleged obligation of the homeowner. After all, the homeowner signed a note which by itself creates an obligation.
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None of this seems to make sense. Yet on an intuitive level, most people understand that they got screwed in what they thought was a lending process.
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The reason for this disconnect between me and most of the rest of the world is that most people have no reason to know what happens in the world of investment banking. As a former investment banker, and as a direct witness to these seminal events that gave rise to the claims of “securitization” I do understand what happened.
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In this article, I will try to explain, from a different perspective, what really happened when most homeowners thought that they were closing a loan transaction. For this to be effective, the reader must be willing to put themselves in the shoes of an investment banker.
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First, you must realize that every investment banker is merely a stockbroker. They do business with investors and other investment bankers. They do not do business with consumers who purchase goods and services or loans. The investment banker is generally not in the business of lending money. The investment banker is in the business of creating capital for new and existing businesses. They make their money by brokering transactions. They make the most money by brokering the sales of new securities including stocks and bonds.
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The compensation received by the investment banker for brokering a transaction varied from as little as 1% or 2% to as much as 20%. The difference is whether they were brokering the sale of existing securities or underwriting new securities. Obviously, they had a very large incentive to broker the sale of new securities for which they would receive 7 to 10 times the compensation of brokering the sale of existing securities.
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But the Holy Grail of investment banking was devising some system in which the investment bank could issue a new security from a fictional entity and receive the entire proceeds of the offering. This is what happened in “residential lending.” And this way, they could receive 100% of the offering instead of a brokerage commission.
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But as you’ll see below, by disconnecting the issuance of securities from the ownership of any perceived obligation from consumers, investment bankers put themselves in a position in which they could issue securities indefinitely without limit and without regard to the amount of the transaction with consumers (homeowners) or investors.
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In short, the goal was to make it appear as though loans have been securitized even know they had not been securitized. In order for any asset to have been securitized it would need to have been sold off in parts to investors. What we see in the residential market is that no such sale ever occurred. Under modern law, a “sale” consists of offer, acceptance, payment, and delivery. So neither the investment bank nor any of the investors to whom they had sold securities, ever received a conveyance of any right, title, or interest to any debt, note, or mortgage from a homeowner.
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At the end of the day, the world was convinced that the homeowner had entered into a loan transaction while the investment banker had assured itself and its investors that it would be free from liability for violation of any lending laws — as a “lender.”
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Neither of them maintained a loan account receivable on their own ledgers even though the capital used to pay homeowners originated from banks who loaned money to investment bankers (based upon sales of “certificates” to investors), which was then used to pay homeowners as little as possible from the pool of capital generated by the loans and certificate sales of “mortgage-backed bonds.”
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From the perspective of the investment banker, payment was made to the homeowner in exchange for participation in creating the illusion of a loan transaction despite the fact that there was no lender and no loan account. This was covered up by having more intermediaries claim rights as servicers and the creation of “payment histories” that implied but never asserted the existence or establishment of a loan account. Of course, they would need to dodge any questions relating to the identification of a creditor. That could be no creditor if there was no loan account. This tactic avoided perjury.
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Of course, this could only be accomplished through deceit. The consumer or homeowner, government regulators, and the world at large, would need to be convinced that the homeowner had entered into a secured loan transaction, even though no such thing had occurred. From the investment bankers’ perspective, they were paying the homeowner as little money as possible in order to create the foundation for their illusion.
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By calling it “securitization of loans” and selling it that way, they were able to create the illusion successfully. They were able to maintain the illusion because only the investment bankers had the information that would show that there was no business entity that maintained a ledger entry showing ownership of any debt, note, or mortgage — against which losses and gains could or would be posted in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (and law). This is called asymmetry of information and a great deal has been written on these pages and by many other authors.
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Since the homeowner had asked for a loan and had received money, it never occurred to any homeowner that he/she was not being paid for a loan or loan documents, but rather was being paid for a service. In order for the transaction to be perceived as a loan obviously, the homeowner had to become obligated to repay the money that had been paid to the homeowner. While this probably negated the consideration paid for the services rendered by the homeowner, nobody was any the wiser.
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As shown below, the initial sale of the initial certificates was only the beginning of an infinite supply of capital flowing to the investment bank who only had to pay off intermediaries to keep them “in the fold.” By virtue of the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1998, none of the certificates were regulated as securities; so disclosure was a matter of proving fraud (without any information) in private actions rather than compliance with any statute. Further, the same investment banks were issuing and trading “hedge contracts” based upon the “performance” of the certificates — as reported by the investment bank in its sole discretion.
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It was a closed market, free from any free market forces. The theory under which Alan Greenspan, Fed Chairman, was operating was that free-market forces would make any necessary corrections, This blind assumption prevented any further analysis of the concealed business plan of the investment banks — a mistake that Greenspan later acknowledged.
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There was no free market. Neither homeowners nor investors knew what they were getting themselves into. And based upon the level of litigation that emerged after the crash of 2008, it is safe to say that the investors and homeowners were deprived of any bargaining position (because the main aspects fo their transition were being misrepresented and concealed), Both should have received substantially more compensation and would have bargained for it assuming they were willing to even enter into the transaction — highly doubtful assumption.
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The investment banks also purchased insurance contracts with extremely rare clauses basically awarding themselves payment for nonexistent losses upon their own declaration of an “event” relating to the “performance” of unregulated securities. So between the proceeds from the issuance of certificates and hedge contracts and the proceeds of insurance contracts investment bankers were generally able to generate at least $12 for each $1 that was paid to homeowners and around $8 for each $1 invested by investors in purchasing the certificates.
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So the end result was that the investment banker was able to pay homeowners without any risk of loss on that transaction while at the same time generating capital or revenue far in excess of any payment to the homeowner. Were it not for the need for maintaining the illusion of a loan transaction, the investment banks could’ve easily passed on the opportunity to enforce the “obligation” allegedly due from homeowners. They had already made their money.
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There was no loss to be posted against any account on any ledger of any company if any homeowner decided not to pay the alleged obligation (which was merely the return of the consideration paid for the homeowner’s services). But that did not stop the investment banks from making claims for a bailout and making deals for loss sharing on loans they did not own and never owned. No such losses ever existed.
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Investment bankers first started looking at the consumer lending market back in 1969, when I was literally working on Wall Street. Frankly, there was no bigger market in which they could participate. But there were huge obstacles in doing so. First of all none of them wanted the potential liability for violation of lending laws that had recently been passed on both local and Federal levels (Truth in Lending Act et al.)
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So they needed to avoid classification as a lender. They achieved this goal in 2 ways. First, they did not directly do business of any kind with any consumer or homeowner. They operated strictly through “intermediaries” that were either real or fictional. If the intermediary was real, it was a sham conduit — a company with virtually no balance sheet or income statement that could be collapsed and “disappeared” if the scheme ever collapsed or just hit a bump in the road.
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Either way, the intermediary was not really a party to the transaction with the consumer or homeowner. It did not pay the homeowner nor did it receive payments from the homeowner. It did not own any obligations from the homeowner, according to modern law, because it had never paid value for the obligation.
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Under modern law, the transfer or conveyance of an interest in a mortgage without a contemporaneous transfer of ownership of the underlying obligation is a legal nullity in all states of the union. So transfers from the originator who posed as a virtual creditor do not exist in the eyes of the law — if they are shown to be lacking in consideration paid for the underlying obligation, as per Article 9 §203 Uniform Commercial Code, adopted in all 50 states. The transfers were merely part of the illusion of maintaining the apparent existence of the loan transaction with homeowners.
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And this brings us to the strategies to be employed by homeowners in contesting foreclosures and evictions based on foreclosures. Based upon my participation in review of thousands of cases it is always true that any question regarding the existence and ownership of the alleged obligation is treated evasively because the obligation does not exist and cannot be owned.
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In court, the failure to respond to such questions that are posed in proper form and in a timely manner is the foundation for the victory of the homeowner. Although there is a presumption of ownership derived from claims of delivery and possession of the note, the proponent of that presumption may not avail itself of that presumption if it fails to answer questions relating to rebutting the presumption of existence and ownership of the underlying obligation. Such cases usually (not always) result in either judgment for the homeowner or settlement with the homeowner on very favorable terms.
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The homeowner is not getting away with anything or getting a free house as the investment banks have managed to insert into public discourse. They are receiving just compensation for their participation in this game in which they were drafted without their knowledge or consent. Considering the 1200% gain enjoyed by the investment banks which was enabled by the homeowners’ participation, the 8% payment to the homeowner seems only fair. Further, if somehow the homeowners’ apparent obligation to pay the investment bank survives, it is subject to reformation, accounting, and computation as to the true balance and whether it is secured or not. 
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The obligation to repay the consideration paid by the investment bank (through intermediaries) seems to be a negation of the consideration paid. If that is true, then there is neither a loan contract nor a securities contract. There is no contract because in all cases the offer and acceptance were based upon different terms ( and different deliveries) without either consideration or execution of the terns expected by the homeowner under the advertised “loan contract.”
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Payments By Homeowners Do Not Reduce Loan Accounts

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Each time that a homeowner makes a payment, he or she is perpetuating the myth that they are part of an enforceable loan agreement. There is no loan agreement if there was no intention for anyone to be a lender and if no loan account receivable was established on the books of any business. The same result applies when a loan is originated in the traditional way but then acquired by a successor. The funding is the same as what is described above. The loan account receivable in the acquisition scenario is eliminated.
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Once the transaction is entered as a reference data point for securitization it no longer exists in form or substance.

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For the past 20 years, most homeowners have been making payments to companies that said they were “servicers.” Even at the point of a judicial gun (court order) these companies will fail or refuse to disclose what they do with the money after “receipt.” Because of lockbox contracts, these companies rarely have any access to pools of money that were generated through payments from homeowners.
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Like their counterparts in the origination of transactions with homeowners, they are sham conduits. Like the originators, they are built to be thrown under the bus when the scheme implodes. They will not report to you the identity of the party to whom they forward payments that they have received from homeowners because they have not received the payments from homeowners and they don’t know where the money goes.
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As I have described in some detail in other articles on this blog, with the help of some contributors, the actual accounting for payments received from homeowners is performed by third-party vendors, mostly under the control of Black Knight. Through a series of sham conduit transfers, the pool of money ends up in companies controlled by the investment bank. Some of the money is retained domestically while some is recorded as an offshore off-balance-sheet transaction.
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In order to maintain an active market in which new certificates can be sold to investors, discretionary payments are made to investors who purchase the certificates. The money comes from two main sources.
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One source is payments made by homeowners and the other source is payments made by the investment bank regardless of whether or not they receive payments from the homeowners. The latter payments are referred to as “servicer advances.” Those payments come from a reserve pool established at the time of sale of the certificates to the investors, consisting of their own money, plus contributions from the investment bank funded by the sales of new certificates. They are not servicer advances. They are neither in advance nor did they come from a servicer.
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Since there is no loan account receivable owned by anyone, payments received from homeowners are not posted to such an account nor to the benefit of any owner of such an account (or the underlying obligation). Instead, accounting for such payments are either reported as “return of capital” or “trading profits.” In fact, such payments are neither return of capital nor trading profit. Since the investment bank has already zeroed out any potential loan account receivable, the only correct treatment of the payment for accounting purposes would be “revenue.” This includes the indirect receipt of proceeds from the forced sale of property in alleged “foreclosures.”
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By retaining total control over the accounting treatment for receipt of money from investors and homeowners, the investment bank retains total control over how much taxable income it reports. At present, most of the money that was received by the investment bank as part of this revenue scheme is still sitting offshore in various accounts and controlled companies. It is repatriated as needed for the purpose of reporting revenue and net income for investment banks whose stock is traded on the open market. By some fairly reliable estimates, the amount of money held by investment banks offshore is at least $3 trillion. In my opinion, the amount is much larger than that.
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As a baseline for corroboration of some of the estimates and projections contained in this article and many others, we should consider the difference between the current amount of all the fiat money in the world and the number and dollar amount of cash-equivalents in the shadow banking market. In 1983, the number and dollar amount of such cash equivalents was zero. Today it is $1.4 quadrillion — around 15-20 times the amount of currency.
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Success in Litigation Depends Upon Litigation Skills: FOCUS

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I have either been lead counsel or legal consultant in thousands of successful cases defending Foreclosure. Thousands of others have been reported to me where they used my strategies to litigate. Many of them resulted in a judgment for the homeowner, but the majority were settled under the seal of confidentiality.
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Thousands more have reported failure. In reviewing those cases it was clear that they were either litigated pro se or by attorneys who were not skilled in trial practice and who had no idea of the principles contained in this article and my many other articles on this blog. I would describe the reason for these failures as “too little too late.” In some ways, the courts are designed more to be final than to be fair. There are specific ways that information becomes evidence. Most people in litigation do not understand the ways that information becomes evidence and therefore fail to object to the foundation, best evidence, hearsay etc.
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Even the people that submit wee phrased and timely discovery demands fail, more often than not, to move for an order to compel when the opposition fails or refuses to answer the simple questions bout the establishment, existence, and ownership of the underlying alleged obligation, debt, note or mortgage. Or they failed to ask for a hearing on the motion to compel, in which case the discovery is waived. Complaining about the failure to answer discovery during the trial when there was no effort to enforce discovery is both useless and an undermining of the credibility of the defense.
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Since I have been litigating cases for around 45 years, I don’t expect younger attorneys to be as well-versed and intuitive in a courtroom as I have been. It’s also true that many lawyers, both older and younger than me, have greater skills than I have. But it is a rare layperson that can win one of these cases without specific training knowledge and experience in motion practice and trial law.
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In the final analysis, if the truth was fully revealed, each foreclosure involves a foreclosure lawyer who does not have any idea whose interest he/she is representing. They may know that they are being paid from an account titled in the name of the self-proclaimed servicer. And because of that, they will often make the mistake of saying that they represent the servicer. They are pretty careful about not specifically saying that the named plaintiff in a judicial foreclosure or the named beneficiary in a nonjudicial foreclosure is their client. That is because they have no retainer agreement or even a relationship with the named plaintiff or the named beneficiary. Such lawyers have generally never spoken with anyone employed by the named plaintiff or the named beneficiary.
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When such lawyers and self-proclaimed servicers go to court-ordered mediation, neither one has the authority to do anything except show up. Proving that the lawyer does not actually represent the named trustee of the fictitious trust can be very challenging. But there are two possible strategies that definitely work.
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The first is to do your legal research and find the cases in which investors have sued the named trustee of the alleged REMIC trust for failure to take action that would’ve protected the interest of the investors.
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The outcome of all such cases is a finding by the court that the trustee does not represent the investors, the investors are not beneficiaries of the “Trust,” and that the trustee has no authority, right, title, or interest over any transaction with homeowners. Since the named trustee has no powers of a trustee to administer the affairs of any active trust with assets or a business operating, it is by definition not a trustee. For purposes of the foreclosure, it cannot be a named party either much less the client of the attorney, behind whom the securitization players are hiding because of a judicial doctrine called “judicial immunity.”
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The second thing you can do is to ask, probably during mediation at the start, whether the lawyer who shows up is representing for example “U.S. Bank.” Or you might ask whether US Bank is the client of the lawyer. The answer might surprise you. In some cases, the lawyer insisted that they represented “Ocwen” or some other self-proclaimed servicer.
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Keep in mind that when you go to mediation, frequently happens that it is attended by a “coverage lawyer” who might not even be employed by the Foreclosure bill. Such a lawyer clearly knows nothing about the parties or the case and will be confused even by the most basic questions. If they fail to affirm that they represent the named trustee of the named fictitious trust, that is the time to stop  the proceeding and file a motion for contempt for failure to appear (i.e., failure of the named plaintiff or beneficiary to appear since no employee or authorized representative appeared.)
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And the third thing that I have done with some success is to make an offer. You will find in most cases that they are unwilling and unable to accept or reject the offer. A substantial offer will put them in a very bad position. Remember you are dealing with a lawyer and a representative from the alleged servicer who actually don’t know what’s going on. Everyone is on a “need to know” footing.
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So if you make an offer that the lawyer thinks could possibly be reasonable and might be acceptable to an actual lender who was holding the loan account receivable, the lawyer might be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Rejection of an offer that the client might want to accept without notifying the client is contrary to bar rules.
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But both the lawyer and the representative of the alleged servicer know that they have no authority. So they will often ask for a continuance or adjournment of the mediation. At that point, the homeowner is well within their rights to file a motion for contempt. In most cases, the court order for mediation requires that both parties attend with full authority to settle the case. In plain language, there is no reason for the adjournment. But they need it because they know they have no authority contrary to the order mandating mediation. Many judges have partially caught on to this problem and instruct the foreclosure mill lawyer to make sure he doesn’t need to “make a call.”
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Every good trial lawyer knows that they must have a story to tell or else, even if the client is completely right, they are likely to lose. You must focus on the main issues.
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The main issue in foreclosure is the establishment, existence, and ownership of the alleged underlying obligation. All of that is going to be presumed unless you demonstrate to the court that you are seeking to rebut those presumptions. There can be no default and hence no remedy is there is either no obligation or no ownership of the obligation by the complaining party.
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Discovery demands should be drafted with an eye towards what will be a motion to compel and proposed order on the motion to compel. They should also be drafted with an eye toward filing a motion in limine. Having failed and refused to answer basic questions about the establishment, existence, and ownership of the alleged underlying obligation, the motion in limine would ask the court to limit the ability of the foreclosure mill to put on any evidence that the obligation exists or is owned by the named Plaintiff or beneficiary. They can’t have it both ways.
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Failure to follow up is the same thing as waiving your defenses or defense narrative.
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So that concludes my current attempt to explain how to win Foreclosure cases for the homeowner. I hope it helps.
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Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 73, is a Florida licensed trial and appellate attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.
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FORECLOSURE DEFENSE IS NOT SIMPLE. THERE IS NO GUARANTEE OF A FAVORABLE RESULT. THE FORECLOSURE MILLS WILL DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO WEAR YOU DOWN AND UNDERMINE YOUR CONFIDENCE. ALL EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT NO MEANINGFUL SETTLEMENT OCCURS UNTIL THE 11TH HOUR OF LITIGATION.
  • But challenging the “servicers” and other claimants before they seek enforcement can delay action by them for as much as 12 years or more.
  • Yes you DO need a lawyer.
  • If you wish to retain me as a legal consultant please write to me at neilfgarfield@hotmail.com.
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Please visit www.lendinglies.com for more information.

OK Let’s Try It Anyway — Amicus Briefs

We now have an opportunity to attack the most absurd of the decisions on 2 grounds, to wit: The first is that the decisions are wrong based upon existing judicial doctrine, statutory law, and court precedent. The second is that the decisions are wrong because the justification for bending the law is also wrong.

 

Please Donate to Support Neil Garfield’s Efforts to stop Foreclosure Fraud.

Please Donate to Support Neil Garfield’s Efforts to stop Foreclosure Fraud.

I know what I said and I meant it. But I have come under a lot of pressure particularly from one person in Hawaii whose financial contributions have been a substantial factor in keeping this effort alive. So I am drafting and filing an amicus brief for filing in Hawaii and I will do the same, assuming financial support is forthcoming, in other states. I still think it is a long shot but I am also convinced that the mere filing will bring more attention to the facts.

The Hawaii case has similarities to most other cases brought by people claiming ownership or authority resulting from the securitization of debt. But in one case, the court went far off the reservation to prevent the homeowner from winning the case despite clear law in Hawaii that the statute of limitations on the obligation, even if it existed, had long run out. That is not a contested issue in the case. Hawaii is not Florida and the Bartram case does not apply. The statute has run and that is the end of it.

So the foreclosure mill invented something out of thin air. It offered up the following theory: the statute of limitations for a claim based on adverse possession expires in 20 years — obviously longer than the actual law for collecting on claims for money in Hawaii. When first raised I told my client that she need not worry about it. The theory was patently absurd. No judge could possibly rule that way. I was wrong.

Please Donate to Support Neil Garfield’s Efforts to stop Foreclosure Fraud.

Please Donate to Support Neil Garfield’s Efforts to stop Foreclosure Fraud.

This is an example of judicial overreach on a grand scale.

First of all, adverse possession is a claim brought by a landowner. It does not expire in 20 years. It starts in 20 years — after a landowner has been occupying land owned by someone else for 20 consecutive years without interruption. A party claiming to be a mortgagee is not a landowner and there is no allegation or any facts in this case that the named “mortgagee” ever occupied or owned any land.

All of this is traceable to one fact — the nearly universal consensus about the status and ownership of the loans is wrong — but is now institutionalized by those who think they understand loans but know absolutely nothing about investment banking — much less understand the intersection of investment banking and lending. This forms the background for ultra vires actions in the courts.

There was no loan. I know, I know. If it looks like a duck etc. That duck is a hologram with no substance in the real world. The reason it looks like a loan is because it was labeled as a loan.

In most cases, it was a securities deal that was concealed from the homeowner or prospective homeowner. In the end, nobody was holding a loan account receivable as an entry on their ledger therefore nobody could claim ownership of any loan account. And that’s why supposed transfers of the loan account had to be fabricated, forged, backdated, and filled with misinformation.

Viewed from that perspective, each homeowner or prospective homeowner should have been paid compensation for their role as an issuer in the securitization scheme. Because this game was concealed we have no way of knowing what the outcome of bargaining would have been had the homeowner known that they were being drafted into a concealed securitization scheme.

But we do know the value that the securitization players used for payment to the homeowner, to wit: The principal amount of the transaction paid to the homeowner. And we now know that “at the end of the day” nobody maintained ownership of any loan, so the transaction could not be considered a loan — i.e., there was no lender at the end of the day.

Viewed from that perspective, foreclosure is an attempt to get back the consideration that they paid to the homeowner for issuing the note and mortgage, without which securitization could not have occurred. Had they been less busy trying to avoid liability for violations of the Truth in Lending Act and other federal and state lending laws, they would’ve maintained the role of creditor and therefore they would have satisfied the factual foundation to allege the existence of a loan. But they didn’t.

From the point of view of legal analysis, the landing statutes never applied because it wasn’t a loan. This was a securitization scheme from start to finish. But it never was a scheme to securitize the debt, note, or mortgage (or payments) of any homeowner. Of all of the different types of securities and contracts that were issued sold and traded, none of them conveyed any interest in the debt, note, mortgage, or payments made by anyone.

Please Donate to Support Neil Garfield’s Efforts to stop Foreclosure Fraud.

Please Donate to Support Neil Garfield’s Efforts to stop Foreclosure Fraud.

One of the biggest problems is that both homeowners and their attorneys have accepted the labeling promoted by Wall Street. When I first started writing about the scheme in 2006 I raised the alarm that this was nothing like what it seems to be. There were no loans and there were no debts nor any owners of debts. And that is what Wall Street intended.

So there are two labels that must be rejected out of hand at the very beginning. The first is the label of “loan”. The second is the label of “Foreclosure.”

The present situation in Hawaii is mirrored in hundreds of other decisions across the country. The absurdity of some of these decisions is clear to most legal analysts. But the justification for such decisions rests on a dissociative condition: the erroneous belief that lending and securitization intersected. They didn’t. We now have an opportunity to attack the most absurd of the decisions on 2 grounds, to wit: The first is that the decisions are wrong based upon existing judicial doctrine, statutory law, and court precedent. The second is that the decisions are wrong because the justification for bending the law is also wrong.

Join with me as we undertake the effort to alter the trajectory of these decisions which effectively ratify and even Institutionalize illegal and fraudulent behavior

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Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 73, is a Florida licensed trial and appellate attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.
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Document Review for Dummies: Why homeowners and their lawyers get confused by documents proffered by foreclosure mills

It occurs to me that most questions I receive contain either an inquiry about the meaning of documents or statements as if they know the meaning of documents. So here is a short primer on reviewing documents that might help.

WHAT (IF ANYTHING) IS THE TITLE OF THE DOCUMENT?

While this seems to be simply a matter of reading and common sense, there is more to it than that. If I draw a rough picture of a dollar bill and hand it to you, nobody will accept it as payment for anything even if the writing on it says “United States Currency” or “One Dollar.”

The reason for that is simply one short statement: No document is an event. And no label can change that. In the case of my artistic dollar, the event would have been a law that says anyone can draw a dollar bill and that everyone must accept it for all debts, public and private. No such preceding event has ever happened nor is it ever going to happen. People don’t issue currency.  Governments do that.

Labeling it as “one dollar” has no more meaning than angel wings in the snow. But while it is a lot less fun than angel wings, a really good fabricated picture of a dollar is likely to be accepted as if it was a real dollar bill. But passing the fake dollar is an illegal act subject to criminal and civil liability.

APPLICATION: Just because a document bears the label “deed,” “assignment” or “allonge” doesn’t make it so. But most homeowners, lawyers, judges and even regulators fail to recognize this basic common sense precept that has been enshrined in law since the law was first written. This error has even become doctrine, supported by legal presumptions if the face of the document confirms to what would ordinarily expect on the face of such a document.

EXAMPLE: An “assignment” is not an assignment of the mortgage unless (a) the grantor owns it and (b) the assignment also conveys ownership of the underlying debt (or the underlying debt was conveyed in a separate instrument by a grantor who owned the underlying debt). [NOTE: Even then the assignment might not be legally effective such as in the case where someone with toxic waste liability conveys the property to a dummy corporation to avoid being hit with damages, fines and penalties. The grantee must expressly or tacitly accept the assignment.] Ref: Article 9 §203 UCC.

WHY WAS THE DOCUMENT CREATED?

The answer to this question there’s actually another question, to wit: what was the event in real life that the document was intended to memorialize?

This reminds me of what my contract professor in law school pounded into our heads on a daily basis, to wit: The note is not the debt — although it may be evidence of a debt.

The debt exists only in the event of a real-world transaction that is enforceable by law. In the case of loans, that is created upon delivery to the closing table. The debtor is the one who accepted that money with eh understanding he/she had to pay it back and the creditor is the one who gave him/her the money. The debt exists regardless f whether there was my written document. It exists independently of any written document.

If the Payee named on the promissory note is the one who paid money to the debtor/maker), the note is admissible evidence in court to prove the terms of repayment and the existence of the debt. In fact, the law has developed that such a note merges with the debt such that the maker and debtor are the same and the Payee and creditor are the same.

BUT if the Payee named on the promissory note is NOT the one who paid money to the debtor/maker), the note is NOT admissible evidence in court to prove the terms of repayment or the existence of the debt. HOWEVER, under modern law, the execution of the promissory note gives rise to its own independent liability of the maker regardless of whether there was any debtor-creditor relationship between maker and payee. Ref: Article 3 UCC.

Such liability can be enforced over the objection of the maker (that here was no real-world transaction giving rise to the obligation) if the party enforcing the note was a bona fide purchaser for value, acting in good faith and without knowledge of the borrower’s defenses at the time the note was purchased.

APPLICATION: Generally speaking, if there is no real-world event memorialized by the document proffered by a party in litigation, the document is inadmissible as proof of the matter asserted — i.e., that the homeowner owes a debt to the party seeking to enforce it. If there is some real-world event (i.e., the homeowner received the money), then the question becomes whether there existed a legal binding relationship between the Payee on the note and the party who paid the money.

BUT, if the party who paid the money did so with no intent to acquire it or retain ownership of the debt, directly or indirectly, then the payment to the homeowner must be categorized as something other than a loan.

There might still be a liability of the homeowner, but only after the court is able to look at the transaction as a whole, and determine the reason for payment and whether that reason was satisfied by the homeowner’s conduct — which in the case of mortgage loans means the execution of documents that might not have any real value except to start the process of the sale of securities having no relation to the ownership of the debt, note or mortgage.

Such a review would also take into account whether the real terms of the contract were disclosed and whether the homeowner had an opportunity to decline participation or bargain for other terms.

EXAMPLE: As explained above an assignment of mortgage is a legal nullity in all States unless the grantee has also paid value in exchange for a conveyance of ownership of the underlying debt —from someone who owns it. Article 9 §203 UCC, adopted in all 50 states, takes it one step further requiring such purchase before anyone could even e considered as a bona fide claimant to enforce a security instrument (mortgage or deed of trust).

So the question is ALWAYS whether such payment of value for the underlying debt ever occurred as an event in the real world.

BUT, an assignment of mortgage that APPEARS to be facially valid is often taken at face value by the homeowner, the lawyers, the course, and the regulators even though the document is not facially valid. Sometimes this is the result of ignorance or laziness. And that brings us to the next point.

WHO SIGNED THE DOCUMENT? WHERE IS WALDO?

This can be really tricky and unless you are prepared to really look at the signature block like you might look at a painting where various figures and shapes appear, you will probably tacitly admit the entire case against you. You have to look long and hard. Think “Where’s Waldo?”

Take absolutely nothing for granted.

So in court, the correct answer is “I don’t know.” After 10-20 years the homeowner has no idea what he/she signed. He/she doesn’t know if the document presented is real or fabricated. He/she, therefore, doesn’t know if that signature on that document is real or fake. SO why admit it? Tell the truth. You don’t know. Make them prove that the document is authentic, valid, and was properly signed by the homeowner(s) at the time fo the original transaction (note that I don’t call it “loan closing” anymore because I don’t think the transaction is legally or logically a loan).

Next on that assignment of mortgage or beneficial rights under a deed of trust: can you tell me in easy English who signed that document and on whose behalf the document was supposedly executed? On close examination in most cases, you cannot. If that cannot be determined from the face of the document then the document is not facially valid. If the document is not facially valid no legal presumptions can arise about its authenticity or validity.

APPLICATION: In most cases, the validity of an assignment cannot be determined without reference to “parol” (external) evidence. Such instruments are facially invalid unless there is something in the public official record that clears up the mystery. Only official public records carry the legal presumption of authenticity and validity as proof of the matter asserted.

NOTE THAT EVEN DOCUMENTS THAT APPEAR TO PASS THE FACIAL VALIDITY SMELL TEST MIGHT STILL BE EXCLUDED AS PROOF OF THE MATTER ASSERTED IF TIMELY OBJECTION IN PROPER FORM IS RAISED AS TO THE CREDIBILITY OF THE SOURCE: Self-proclaimed servicers are preferred by foreclosure mills as thought hey are third parties with no stake in the outcome of the litigation. Good discovery and motion practice could reveal that the reverse is true — the claimed servicer is really a foreclosure vehicle acting for concealed third parties and who goes out of business if the foreclosures are unsuccessful.

EXAMPLE: “John Smith, Official Document Examiner, SOLVANG SERVICING, LLC, as attorney in fact for CSLOBS, INC., successor to Jasmine Bank, as attorney in fact, for AMERICAN BANK AND TRUST, AS SUCCESSOR FOR MAKE A WISH MUTUAL BANKING, ON BEHALF OF THE REGISTERED HOLDERS OF CSLOBS, INC. PASS-THROUGH CERTIFICATES Series 2006-ZX1.”

There are lots of it assumptions that you could make about such a signature block at the end of the document. None of them would be true. And none of them would make any sense. But it is custom and practice to ignore such signature block as though an authorized signature had occurred on behalf of a grantor who possessed something to grant.

QUESTIONS:

      1. Does John Smith exist? [If you were creating a false document who would want to sign it with their real name?]
      2. Was John Smith an authorized signatory for Solvang?
      3. Was John Smith an employee who knew something about the content of what he was signing or did he just sign it because his job consisted of stamping it writing his signature on thousands of documents per day?
      4. Was John Smith employed by some other company that doesn’t appear on this signature block?
      5. Who owns Solvang? {If the answer is some investment bank then documents executed or created by them suffer from a lack of credibility that could bar their admission into evidence.]
      6. Is the power of attorney attached to the document?
      7. Is there any descriptive language that would enable the reader to ascertain the existence, provisions, and validity of any power of attorney at the time of signing? If not my opinion is that the document is facially invalid. External proof is required to determine whether such power exists and was granted by someone who (a) intended to grant it and (b) had ownership or control over the subject matter (i.e., the mortgage or deed of trust).
      8. Where does Make  A Wish Mutual Bank fit into the chain?
      9. Who is CSLOBS, Inc.?
      10.  Where and what is the registry of holders of certificates? See power of attorney analysis)
      11. Who are the holders of the certificates? [Since they are defined as the parties on whose behalf the document as executed, the absence of an actual name by which they could be identified renders the document facially invalid.]
      12. Are the holders of the certificates the owners of pro-rata shares of debts, notes or mortgages? How do we know that? If not, why are they mentioned?
      13. What exactly passes through where and who is involved in that?
      14. IS THERE A HIDDEN TRUST NAME INVOLVED IN THIS CHAIN? IF SO WHAT I OWNED BY THE TRUSTEE OR THE TRUST? WHO IS THE TRUSTEE? WHAT ARE THE TRUSTEE POWERS? WHO ARE THE BENEFICIARIES? WHO WERE THE TRUSTORS OR SETTLORS?
*
Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 73, is a Florida licensed trial and appellate attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.
NOTE: I HAVE PREPARED A 2 HOUR PRESENTATION ON DOCUMENT ANALYSIS FOR A ZOOM PRESENTATION. I HAVE NOT YET SELECTED A DATE. THE PRICE IS $595 AND INCLUDES A FOLLOW UP ONE HOUR Q&A MEETING ONE WEEK AFTER THE PRESENTATION FOR THOSE WHO PARTICIPATE LIVE. NO DISCOUNTS ARE AVAILABLE. IT WILL PROBABLY BE THE FIRST WEEK OF DECEMBER. IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN PARTICIPATING PLEASE WRITE TO ME AT NEILFGARFIELD@ICLOUD.COM. CLE ACCREDITATION FOR LAWYERS IS EXPECTED. 
*

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  • But challenging the “servicers” and other claimants before they seek enforcement can delay action by them for as much as 12 years or more.
  • Yes you DO need a lawyer.
  • If you wish to retain me as a legal consultant please write to me at neilfgarfield@hotmail.com.
*
Please visit www.lendinglies.com for more information.

 

 

 

Trusts, Trustors, Settlors and Fake REMIC Trusts

All trusts that are legally recognized as such have the following basic components: the trustor/settlor who (a) executes a written trust agreement and (b) conveys property into the name of the named trustee to hold and manage the conveyed asset(s) for the benefit of named beneficiaries. So the three basic components are (1) property (the res), (2) a trustor/settlor, and (3) beneficiaries. Pooling and servicing agreements when read closely reveal in all cases that they are missing all three components.

*

Trustees only exist in relation to a defined trust. A trust may technically exist if it is written down on paper. But it has no legal existence in court unless there is (a) something in it and (b) that something is relevant to the dispute being litigated in court. If it has no legal existence in court then the presumed powers of the trustee are irrelevant. The trustee’s power over claims or property are only as great as what is legally existing within the trust. That means that someone who owned an asset transferred it to the name of the trustee to hold in trust for the benefit of specific beneficiaries. In no case that I ever examined did such a transaction ever take place in connection with REMIC trusts or residential loans.

*
Several legal malpractice suits have been based upon the failure of the lawyer to advise his/her client that the trust that has been drafted and executed is still completely worthless if the trustor does not transfer assets into the trust. The beneficiaries find out the hard way that the trust may have indicated an intent to distribute certain assets to them, but if there is nothing owned by the trust, they get nothing. It’s like forming a corporation in whose name no business is ever done. It doesn’t matter that the intent of the founder of the corporation meant to conduct business in the name of the trust.
*
The corporation, like a trust, is a legal fiction equivalent (see Citizens United) to a legal person. That legal person cannot legally operate or own a car, directly or indirectly even through employment of a human, unless it legally buys the car and registers and insures it in accordance with state law. If the car gets into an accident then the person driving it is the one who will get sued because unless you can show that the person driving it was doing so at the behest of the corporation that did not own it, the corporation did nothing at all.
*
Going back to the original question, the REMIC Trust exists on paper and is either regarded as inchoate (sleeping) or nonexistent, depending upon state law. Being named as trustee of such a trust conveys no power over anything except for what has been conveyed by a trustor/settlor to the trustee for the express purpose of holding and managing the asset for the benefit of named beneficiaries. While there are several references to things that might happen in the future, no such conveyance is ever recited as an accomplished fact.
*
It therefore follows by simple logic that if a servicer is claiming the right to administer, collect or enforce a debt, it must be doing so on behalf of a legal person who is entitled to such administration, collection and enforcement. If the company claiming the label of “servicer” is claiming it is empowered by the trustee of a REMIC trust, then that trustee must have power over the asset (i.e., debt, note or mortgage or DOT). If a Bank party is claiming to be a trustee over the asset, then the asset must have been bought, conveyed, sold to the t trustee to hold and manage in trust for the benefit of beneficiaries. Conveyance of an interest in a mortgage or other encumbrance requires that the grantor legally own it and that the party receiving it pay value for it.
*
I have read the actual trust agreements that exist far from prying eyes of foreclosure defense lawyers. They specifically acknowledge that the trustee is getting, in name only, a conveyance that is (a) worthless since it does not include conveyance of the underlying obligation and (b) to hold for the sole benefit and subject to the direction of the investment bank that originated the securitization scheme. The investors who buy certificates are unsecured creditors, not beneficiaries.  I remind the reader that no such securitization scheme ever securitized the debt, note or mortgage of any residential homeowner.
*

BOTTOM LINE: ASK FOR THE ACTUAL TRUST AGREEMENT — AND DON’T ACCEPT THE ARGUMENT THAT IT IS THE PSA.

*
Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 73, is a Florida licensed trial and appellate attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.
*

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FORECLOSURE DEFENSE IS NOT SIMPLE. THERE IS NO GUARANTEE OF A FAVORABLE RESULT. THE FORECLOSURE MILLS WILL DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO WEAR YOU DOWN AND UNDERMINE YOUR CONFIDENCE. ALL EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT NO MEANINGFUL SETTLEMENT OCCURS UNTIL THE 11TH HOUR OF LITIGATION.
  • But challenging the “servicers” and other claimants before they seek enforcement can delay action by them for as much as 12 years or more.
  • Yes you DO need a lawyer.
  • If you wish to retain me as a legal consultant please write to me at neilfgarfield@hotmail.com.
*
Please visit www.lendinglies.com for more information.

More Details on VendorScape, CoreLogic and Black Knight

Hat tip to “Summer chione”

So it is apparent that the banks are responding to discoveries about how orders are transmitted to lawyers, “servicers”, realtors etc.. While it is all the same playbook, they merely change the name of the characters. So internally the name VendorScape might still be used but externally, to the public, they are showing different names and even showing multiple names for the same “service”.

But is always the same, to wit: a central repository of data that has been robotically entered to support misrepresentations of investment banks that massage the data, control the reports, and initiate administration, collection and enforcement under the letterhead of “subservicers” who have almost nothing to do and are merely being kept alive to throw under the bus when this scheme explodes.

For those familiar with the game of Chess, think of the following entities as all being pawns whose existence is to provide a barrier to the encroachment of government or borrowers in litigation — and who can and will be sacrificed when the game explodes.

  1. Foreclosure law firms (“mills”)
  2. “Servicers”
  3. Trustee of REMIC Trust
  4. Trustee on Deed of trust
  5. MERS
  6. Companies that provide “default services”
  7. Realtors
  8. Property  Managers
  9. REMIC  trusts: remember that back in early 2000’s, the same trusts that are being named as claimants today were denied as having any existence or relevance. It was only after failure of naming a servicer or MERS that they fell back on naming the non functional trustee of a nonexistent trust as the claimant.
  10. Every other company that is visible to the investors and homeowners.

And keep in mind that the claims of a “boarding Process” or detailed audit of accounts when the name of one subservicer is changed to something else are totally and completely bogus. There is no transfer much less boarding of accounts. the fabricated accounts are always maintained at the central repository.

The argument over “business records” is sleight of hand distraction. There are no business records. Go do your research. You will see that nothing the banks are producing are qualified business records, muchless exceptions to the hearsay rule. 

It is or at least was universal custom and practice that before accepting  an engagement, lawyers, servicers and realtors needed to have an agreement in writing with their employer. In the wholly unique area of foreclosures, sales, REO and remittances this practice has been turned on its head.

As I have repeatedly said on these pages, lawyers in a foreclosure mill have no idea who hired them. They don’t know the identity of their client. They will and do say that their client is some “subservicer” (e.g. Ocwen), they file lawsuits and documents proclaiming their representation of some bank (e.g. Deutsche) with whom they have (a) no contact and (b) no retainer Agreement.

This is because all that Deutsche agreed to was the use of its name to give the foreclosure an institutional flavor. It is labelled as a trustee but it possesses zero powers of any party that could be legally described as a trustee. It has no fiduciary duty to any beneficiaries nor any right to even inquire about the business affairs of the trust — which we know now (with certainty) do not even exist.

So there is no reason for the foreclosure mill to have an agreement with Deutsche because (a) Deutsche has not agreed to be a real party in interest and (b) Deutsche has no ownership, right, title or interest in any loan — either on tis own behalf or as representative of either a nonexistent or inchoate (sleeping) trust with no assets or business or the owners of non certificated certificates (i.e., digital only). Indeed the relationship between Deutsche and the holders of certificates is that of creditor (the investors) and debtor (Deutsche acting as the business name only of an investment bank who issued the certificates).

So the lawyers in the foreclosure mill are misrepresenting its authority to represent. In fact it has no authority to represent the “trustee” bank.

So the banks have come up with a circular argument that is still erroneously used and believed in court: that because the subservicer (e.g. Ocwen) is the nominal client — albeit without any contact prior to the electronic instructions received by the foreclosure mill — and because the subservicer claims to be acting for either the trustee, teht rust or the holders of certificates, that eh lawyers can claim to be representing the bank, as trustee. In a word, that is not true.

So the foreclosure mill is falsely claiming that its client is the named “trustee” who has no power for a “trust” which has no assets or business on behalf of certificate holders who own no right, title or interest to any payments, debt, note or mortgage executed by any “borrower.”

Instructions from a third party with no right, title or interest that the lawyer should claim  representation rights for yet another party who has no knowledge, right, title or interest is a legal nullity. That means that, in the legal world, (like transfer of mortgage  rights without transfer for the underlying debt), there is nothing that any court is legally able to recognize and any attempt to do so would be ultra vires once the facts are known to the court.

The trick is to present it to the court in such a manner that it is unavoidable. And the best way to do that is through aggressive discovery strategies. the second best way is through the use of well planned timely objections at trial.

All of this is done, contrary to law and prior custom and practice to cover up the fact that all such foreclosures are for profit ventures.

That is, the goal is not paydown of any loan account, because no such account exists on the books of any creditor.

And that is hiding the fact that the origination or acquisition of the loan was completed with zero intent for anyone to become a lender or creditor and therefore subject to rules, regulations and laws governing lending and servicing practices.

They didn’t need to be a lender or creditor because they were being paid in full from the sales of securities and thus writing off the homeowner transaction. Bottom Line: There was no lending intent by the originator or acquirer of the loan. When the cycle was complete, the investment bank owned nothing but still controlled everything.

And the way they controlled everything was by hiring intermediaries who would have plausible deniability because they were using images and records that were automatically generated and produced based upon algorithms written by human hands — programs designed to facilitate foreclosure rather than report the truth.

So let’s be clear. Here is the process. The lawyer, realtor or subservicer knows nothing about the loan until it is time to foreclose. All activity that is conducted under its name is initiated by CoreLogic using the VendorScape system.

So when a lawyer, for example, comes to work, he sits down in front of a computer and gets a message that he doesn’t know came from CoreLogic under the direction of Black KNight who is acting under the strict control of the investment banks. There are no paper documents. The message on the screen says initiate foreclosure work on John Jones in the name of Deutsche Bank as trustee for the CWABS Trust 2006-1 on behalf of the certificateholders of CWABS Trust 2006-1 series pass through certificates.

Contrary to the rules of law and ethical and disciplinary rules governing lawyers, the lawyer does no due diligence to discover the nature his agreement with the naemd claimant, no research on whether the claim is valid, and requires no confirmation ledgers showing establishment of ownership of the debt and financial loss arising from cessation of payments. He/she sends notice of delinquency, notice of default and initiates foreclosure without ever seeing or even hearing about a retainer agreement with Deutsche whom he supposedly represents.

He/she has no knowledge regarding the status or ownership of the loan account. ZERO. By not knowing he/she avoids liability for lying to the court. And not knowing also provides at least a weak foundation for invoking litigation privilege for false representations in court, behind which the investment banks, Black Knight, CoreLogic et al hide. The same plausible deniability doctrine is relied upon by CoreLogic and Black Knight. They will all say that they thought the loan account was real.

But they all knew that if the loan accounts were real, the notes would not have been destroyed, the control over the loan accounts would have stayed close to the investment banks and compliance with lending and servicing laws would have been much tighter — starting with disclosure to investors that their money was being used to justify a nonexistent trading profit for the investment bank, and disclosure to homeowners that they were signing on for an inflated appraisal, immediate loss of equity, and likely foreclosure because after the origination, the only real money to be made off the loan was through foreclosure.

And both investors and borrowers were prevented, through the artful practice of deceit and concealment, from bargaining for appropriate incentives and compensation for assuming gargantuan risks they know nothing about.

This is like cancer and it is continuing. Nobody would suggest that we keep selling crops that were infected with ebola or which contained some tar substance that reliably and consistently produced cancer. The argument that a company or industry might collapse would not fly because in the end we value human life more than allowing companies to profit off of death and destruction. And the argument that allowing the judicial creation of virtual creditors who can enforce non existent debt accounts is going to save the financial system is just as pernicious — and erroneous.

Wall Street banks are merely protecting their profits. Don’t blame them for doing that. It is up to government and the public to stop it and arrive at something other than the false binary choice of either forcing people out of their homes or allowing a “windfall” to homeowners against the interest of all other honest people who make their mortgage payments. The real solution lies in reformation by judicial doctrine or through new legislation — but until that is completed, there should be no foreclosures allowed. Until it is determined how much concealed risk was piled on investors and borrowers, they should not be stuck with contracts or agreements that sealed their doom through concealment of material facts.

*
Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 73, is a Florida licensed trial attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.
*

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  • But challenging the “servicers” and other claimants before they seek enforcement can delay action by them for as much as 12 years or more.
  • Yes you DO need a lawyer.
  • If you wish to retain me as a legal consultant please write to me at neilfgarfield@hotmail.com.
*
Please visit www.lendinglies.com for more information.

Processing Fees are more than illegal — by adding them to balance due, the default letter is defective.

This is simple logic. If illegal processing fees were greedily added to the “loan accounts” falsely asserted to exist, then the amount demanded from “borrowers” was incorrect. That would make the statements sent to borrowers part of a fraudulent scheme through US Mails which would be mail fraud. And it would make the notices of delinquency and notice of default and notices of default defective and perhaps fatally defective because they were seeking to enforce an amount not due. And it would make foreclosure judgments and sales based upon such demands potentially voidable.

see https://spotonflorida.com/southeast-florida/1835819/ocwen-phh-corp-pay-125-million-settlement.html

CLICK HERE ORDER ADMINISTRATIVE STRATEGY, ANALYSIS AND NARRATIVE. This could be all you need to preserve your objections and defenses to administration, collection or enforcement of your obligation.

You know Ocwen. It’s that company that stays in business by the largess of large financial institutions that buy its stock on the open market. Investment bankers use the Company to shield themselves and their own company from potentially trillions of dollars in liability — and possibly prison. It is the company that pretends to be the “servicer” of your loan — which you readily accept because (a) someone needs to do it and (b) nobody else is saying they are “servicing” your loan.

But in reality it is not your servicer because of some technical problems – like the absence of a loan account and the absence of anyone who claims to own your loan account. Only such a company that owned your debt could give authority to a third party to administer, collect or enforce your debt or loan account. Ocwen never received that authority from anyone because in most cases (nearly all) no such creditor exists. (see previous blog articles as to how this highly counterintuitive result is created and exploited by investment banks).

And there is another sticky problem because Ocwen doesn’t actually “service” your loan payments — Black Knight does that, hidden behind the curtains that Goldman Sachs calls “layering” or laddering.” So in the musical chairs presentation of servicers, for enforcement, and Ocwen is designated by Black Knight to come forward as “servicer”, it does so as a witness once removed from the actual entity that collected payments on behalf of a loan account that doesn’t exist.

In plain language the entire process of “boarding” is a charade. The prior company that was designated as “servicer” is simply dropped from the letterhead of notices and statements generated by Black Knight, and Ocwen’s name is inserted instead. “Boarding” comprises a new login name and password to the Black Knight systems.

Ocwen/PHH (after merger) have never made a profit and never will. It is a publicly traded business entity that is waiting to be thrown under the bus. When the s–t hits the fan, and it becomes widely known and accepted that there are no loan accounts and there is nothing to administer, collect or enforce, the plan is to have Ocwen, and companies like Ocwen to take the heat, leaving the investment banks free from blame or liability for civil or criminal infractions. At least that is the plan. But if the government ever breaks free of the control by Wall Street — and clawback of money siphoned from our economy becomes a priority —then it won’t be difficult to pierce through the corporate veils of Ocwen like companies to seize assets held here and abroad.

So it should come as no surprise that such people would add on such things as “processing” or “convenience” fees when there is no processing and there is no convenience. Ocwen has now agreed to pay money because it received a slap on the wrist. But like the hundreds of preceding settlements, nobody is asking about the effect of the illegal practices on the presumed loan accounts, even if they existed.

This is simple logic. If illegal processing fees were greedily added to the “loan accounts” falsely asserted to exist, then the amount demanded from “borrowers” was incorrect. That would make the statements sent to borrowers part of a fraudulent scheme through US Mails which would be mail fraud. And it would make the notices of delinquency and notice of default and notices of default defective and perhaps fatally defective because they were seeking to enforce an amount not due. And it would make foreclosure judgments and sales based upon such demands potentially voidable.

But nobody talks about that because it is the unstated sub silentio policy to uphold the securitization infrastructure that does not exist, to wit: no loan was sold and no loan was securitized. That is impossible because for securitization to be real the loan must be sold to investors. There was never any such sale.

*Neil F Garfield, MBA, JD, 73, is a Florida licensed trial attorney since 1977. He has received multiple academic and achievement awards in business and law. He is a former investment banker, securities broker, securities analyst, and financial analyst.*

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  • But challenging the “servicers” and other claimants before they seek enforcement can delay action by them for as much as 12 years or more. 
  • Yes you DO need a lawyer. 

*Please visit www.lendinglies.com for more information.

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