Facially Invalid Recorded Documents

Posted on January 30, 2019 by Neil Garfield

The view proffered by the banks would require them to accept declarations of fact from potential borrowers without any indicia of truth or reliability. It is opposite to the manner in which they do business. Currently they have it both ways, to wit: for purposes of borrowing you must submit documents that are facially valid without reference to external evidence and which can be easily confirmed but for purposes of foreclosure, none of those conditions apply. 

As part of the the scheme of “securitization fail” (see Adam Levitin) banks, servicers and third party vendors have been creating, fabricating and executing documents that are not facially valid nor do they comply with industry standards or even common sense. But once recorded judges take them “at face value” by assuming that somehow the document makes sense, when it clearly does not comport with law or logic. Defenders of foreclosure act at their peril when they fail to attack the facial validity of the documents upon which the foreclosure claims rely.

In a recent article written by Dale Whitman for the ABA he states the following “Conclusion. The recording system is archaic and fraught with the potential for yielding wrong conclusions. Conversion by many recording jurisdictions to computer-based electronic indexes has been helpful, but most of the legally problematic flaws continue to exist. Title insurance has been invaluable in making the weight of the recording system bearable, but it adds a further layer of complexity as buyers try to understand the limitations of their title policies. It seems unlikely that major changes will occur, so it is essential that real estate lawyers understand the peculiarities and limitations of our present system.” (e.s.)

As he points out recording is not required to make a document valid, but once it is recorded the document takes on a life of its own. It also presents numerous trapdoors and pitfalls that should be analyzed before answering the initiation of a foreclosure proceeding with any action on behalf of the homeowner including the motion to dismiss in judicial states, the answer, affirmative defenses and the Petition for TRO or lawsuit for wrongful foreclosure.

see what you didn_t know about recording acts_whitman (2).authcheckdam

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THIS ARTICLE IS NOT A LEGAL OPINION UPON WHICH YOU CAN RELY IN ANY INDIVIDUAL CASE. HIRE A LAWYER.
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Common sense tells you that for a document to mean anything it must say enough that a reasonable person would be able to confidently draw meaning from it. Analyzing the facial validity of documents used in foreclosure reveals a pattern of misrepresenting the facial validity and misdirecting judges into NOT looking closely at the documents from which they are making assumptions and thence to legal conclusions that bind homeowners into proving matters beyond their control.

I proffer here an analysis that I just completed (our TERA report) as an example.

  1. We have already seen documentary proof that BONY Mellon does not receive the proceeds of the sale of property subject to the power of sale in a nonjudicial state or the forced sale in a judicial state. There are many reasons for this.
  2. Analysis of the facial validity of the use of various names and descriptions reveals the absence of an actual party, unless extrinsic “parole) evidence is added. Hence the documents upon which the above language relies does not support facial validity.
  3. BONY Mellon is said to be the “successor to JP Morgan Chase.” It is not and never has been a successor to JPMorgan Chase. There is nothing in the public domain to support that assertion. There is no instrument attached and no description of any transaction in which, as to this subject property and loan, we can ascertain how BONY Mellon became the successor to JPM Morgan Chase. Hence the documents in which BONY Mellon appears are not facially valid and are defective in terms of proof of title. This could be corrected by affidavit or any process that is allowed in the state where the property is located but it hasn’t been done on record, and there is no evidence to suggest that it has been done but is not recorded. The usual and acceptable manner of phrasing such a succession, if it were true, would be “as successor to JP Morgan Chase pursuant to that certain agreement of transfer by and between JPMorgan Chase (and /or other parties) and BONY Mellon dated July 6, 200X.” The absence of such description leaves the reader to pursue extrinsic or parole evidence to determine if the succession is documented and if so whether that documentation is facially valid. This is all absent.
  4. The succession suggests that it is in the role of trustee. There is no instrument attached and no description of any transaction in which, as to this subject property and loan, we can ascertain how BONY Mellon became the successor Trustee to JPM Morgan Chase. Hence the documents in which BONY Mellon appears as trustee are not facially valid and are defective in terms of proof of title. This could be corrected by affidavit or any process that is allowed in the state where the property is located but it hasn’t been done on record, and there is no evidence to suggest that it has been done but is not recorded. The usual and acceptable manner of phrasing such a succession, if it were true, would be “as successor to JP Morgan Chase, trustee pursuant to that certain agreement of transfer by and between JPMorgan Chase (and /or other parties) and BONY Mellon dated July 6, 200X.” The absence of such description leaves the reader to pursue extrinsic or parole evidence to determine if the succession is documented and if so whether the documentation is facially valid. This is all absent. The absence of a description of a specific trust and trust instrument is yet another factor that renders the instrument facially invalid, but theoretically correctible.
  5. This leads to a further question of extrinsic evidence being required. Other than by the use of parole evidence (outside the information contained on the document itself) the reader cannot ascertain the existence or description of a specific trust organized and existing under the laws of any jurisdiction. In addition, the issue of a transfer or change of trustees of a trust, if one can be found, is not supported by language such as “pursuant to the provisions of the trust agreement dated the 3rd day of May, 200Y in which the trust named ‘Structured Asset Mortgage Investment II, Inc. Bear Stearns ALT-A Trust’ was created under the laws of the State of New York”. Without such reference the facial validity of the instruments remains invalid although theoretically correctible. Without the knowledge of the legal existence of the trust being confirmable by public record, there is no support for the implied trust. Without support for the implied trust and the trust agreement creating it, there is no obvious support for how trustees could exist or be changed. Without support on the face of the instruments for how trustees of a trust could be changed, the description of the change of trustees is merely a declaration that is not supported by anything on the face of the document.
  6. JPMorgan is implied to have been the trustee of the potentially nonexistent trust. Once again the implied assertion leaves the reader to determine if the trust was created pursuant to the laws of any jurisdiction, and if JPMorgan was named as trustee for the trust.
  7. In either event both BONY Mellon and JPMorgan are described to be acting in a representative capacity on behalf of “holders… of pass through certificates” and not as “trustees” of any “trust.” The certificates are identified as Mortgage Pass Through Certificates Series 2004-12. The reference to being a “trustee” and the implied representation of the holders of certificates would be acceptable if the “holders” were described as beneficiaries. The extrinsic evidence often shows that such holders are not beneficiaries. This leads to the question of how and why there is representation of the holders, apart from the alleged trust, Is the representation implied from the trust agreement that is not described? Is the representation the result of some other trust or agency agreement? It is not possible to ascertain the answers to these vital questions without resort to extrinsic evidence, thus making the instruments relying upon such language, facially invalid.

Every state has statutory requirements for an instrument to be facially valid. A deed between Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse as Grantor and Grantee respectively would not be facially valid because both the grantor nor the grantee are fictitious names of cartoon characters and unless used as a egla fictitious name for an actual entity doing business under that name the document could not be corrected to become a valid document suitable for recording.

Yet county recorders are allowing the recordation of millions of documents across the country with exactly that defect. By allowing such documents to be recorded they are lending support to the legal presumption that Donald and Mickey are real people with rights to transfer interests in real property and even foreclose on real property. At the end of the chain of written documents someone holds paper that is recorded but based upon a chain of title with two large gaps in it — Donald and Mickey, and by the time the foreclosure occurs probably Minnie Mouse as well (or maybe Fannie or Freddie whose names are being used, just like the “REMIC trustees”, but who have no part in any transaction involving the subject loan).

Back to Real Property 101.

  1. Who is the grantor? If that cannot be readily determined from the face of the instrument the instrument is facially invalid.
  2. Who is the grantee? If that cannot be readily determined from the face of the instrument the instrument is facially invalid.
  3. What is the effective date of transfer? If that cannot be readily determined from the face of the instrument the instrument is facially invalid.
  4. What is being transferred? If that cannot be readily determined from the face of the instrument the instrument is facially invalid — or, in the case of a mortgage or beneficial interest in a deed of trust if the instrument declares a transfer but without the underlying debt, the instrument is facially invalid and unenforceable both because of state statutes regarding facial validity and the UCC Article 9 requiring value to be paid (see above linked article).
  5. What is the legal description of the property affected? If that cannot be readily determined from the face of the instrument the instrument is facially invalid.

An instrument that is not facially valid should be returned by the recording office with notes specifying what needs to be corrected. This vital step is being overlooked on all documents relating to foreclosures. If rules, laws and procedures were followed with regard to such documents there would not be any foreclosure or, if the corrections could actually be made, there would be no defense. It is in the valley between those two notions that all foreclosures based on “successors” are based.

By overlooking the obvious lack of clarity on the face of the documents county recorders keep creating a vacuum that the banks are only too happy to fill with MERS — an IT platform that is the opposite of tamper-proof allowing virtually anyone with a login and password to create the illusion of authority where none existed before. Hence the use of MERS and other systems to give depth to the illusion of facial validity.

The conclusion is that documents containing the language described above should not have been recorded.  The county recorder should have rejected such documents as being facially invalid, requiring additional documents to be attached, if they existed.

Such language is a substantial deviation from custom and practice as well as common sense and logic.  Custom and practice of the same banks that are listed in the language described above requires that they not accept such language without the additional documentation and confirmation of facts that are declared on the face of the instrument.  Common sense dictates that the reason why such custom and practice exists is that most fraudulent schemes involve written instruments in which various declarations are made that are untrue or lack support.  For purposes of recording, any declaration on the face of the instrument that requires the attachment or description of documents that are readily available in the public domain would be unacceptable, much as, for example, a deed without a signature.  The property must be described with precision (or later corrected by affidavit), the grantor must be described with precision (or later corrected) and the grantee must be described with precision (or later corrected).  Without the required corrections, the documents are facially invalid.

For purposes of case analysis, the absence of facially valid documents, even though they were improperly recorded, negates the potential use of legal presumptions arising from the facial validity of documents.  Therefore such documents should be rejected without proper foundation in connection with the use of such documents for any purpose, and the attempt to introduce such documents into evidence in any court or administrative proceeding.

In the case currently under analysis, this means that the proceedings in which the property was allegedly foreclosed, were themselves all improper and based upon invalid terms.  Whether this renders the proceedings void or voidable depends upon case law and interpretations of constitutional due process.

However it is safe to say that based upon the above analysis, it is obvious that all such documents including the deed upon foreclosure are defective in several material respects.  Therefore, our conclusion is that the current title chain in the county records regarding this property is at best clouded.  The procedures for correcting clouded title vary from state to state and are subject to both federal and state laws.  Individual research on each case in each state is required before taking any action.

The view proffered by the banks would require them to accept declarations of fact from potential borrowers without any indicia of truth or reliability. It is opposite to the manner in which they do business. Currently they have it both ways, to wit: for purposes of borrowing you must submit documents that are facially valid without reference to external evidence and which can be easily confirmed but for purposes of foreclosure, none of those conditions apply. 

 

Filed under: burden of persuasion, burden of pleading, BURDEN OF PROOF, CORRUPTION, discovery, Discovery -Subpoena, evidence, Fabrication of documents, foreclosure, foreclosure defenses, foreclosure mill, forensic investigation, forgery, investment banking, Investor, jurisdiction, legal standing, MBS TRUSTEE, MODIFICATION, Mortgage, Pleading, prima facie case, securities fraud, Servicer, sham transactions, standing, STATUTES, TRUST BENEFICIARIES, trustee | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Bank Fraud News: The reason why banks and servicers should receive no presumption of reliability

Posted on April 12, 2018 by Neil Garfield

The following is but a short sampling supporting the argument that any document coming from the banks and servicers is suspect and unworthy of any legal presumption of authenticity or validity. Judges are looking into self-serving fabricated documentation and coming to the wrong conclusion about the facts.

Chase following bank playbook: screw the customer

“Chase provided no prior notice to its cardholders that their crypto ‘purchases’ would be treated as ‘cash advances’ on a going forward basis,” according to the suit.

Tucker claims he was hit with about $140 in fees and a “sky-high” interest rate of 26 percent without warning after Chase reclassified his purchases as cash advances, a violation of the Truth in Lending act.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Stealth: Hiding the elephant in the living room

Its never been a secret that Freddie Mac’s business policy is to remain stealth in any chain of title if possible, and to rely on the servicers to keep its presence a secret in foreclosure proceedings. In fact, this PNC case which was overturned against PNC, involved the Defendant’s assertion that PNC was concealing Freddie Mac’s interest in the loan. Freddie Mac’s business policy appears to rely upon nothing more than handshakes with the originators and servicers. Here is some verbiage from a “Freddie Mac – Mortgage Participation Certificates” disclosure (See: Freddie Mac – Mortgage Participation Certificates):

Deutsch files lawsuit against private mailbox troller following the Deutsch playbook of foreclosure

“Defendants, and each of them initiated a malicious campaign to disrupt the chain of title to prevent Plaintiff from enforcing its contractual rights in the 2006 DOT by way of recording fraudulent documents to purportedly assign the rights under the 2006 DOT without the consent of Plaintiff, and otherwise thereafter fraudulently transfer all rights via a trustee deed upon sale, even though no trustee sale was ever conducted. All subsequently recorded or unrecorded transactions are therefore null, void, and of no effect.”

EDITOR COMMENT: So Deutsch is admitting that its practice of recording fraudulent documents are “null, void and of not effect.” In order to get to that point Deutsch is going to be required to prove standing — i.e., definitive proof that it paid for the debt, which it did not. Deutsch is on dangerous ground here and might deliver a bonus for homeowners. As for the defense, is it really a crime to steal a fraudulent deed of trust supported by fraudulent assignments and endorsements?

Barclays Bank settles for $2,000,000,000 for fraud on investors

Barclays’ offering documents “systematically and intentionally misrepresented key characteristics of the loans,” and more than half of the loans defaulted, federal officials said.

Additionally, the Department of Justice reached similar settlements with two Barclays’ employees involved with subprime residential mortgage-backed securities. They will pay $2 million collectively.

The agreements mark the latest in a string of U.S. settlements with major banks over sales of tainted mortgage securities from 2005 to 2007 that helped set the stage for the real estate crash that contributed to the financial crisis.

Deutsch Pays $7.2 Billion for Fraudulent securitizations

Confirming settlement details the bank disclosed in late December, federal investigators said Deutsche Bank will pay a $3.1 billion civil penalty and provide $4.1 billion in consumer relief to homeowners, borrowers, and communities that were harmed.

The federal penalty is the highest ever for a single entity involved in selling residential mortgage-backed securities that proved to be far more risky than Deutsche Bank led investors to believe. Nonetheless, the agreement represents relief of sorts for the bank and its shareholders, because federal investigators initially sought penalties twice as costly.

Credit Suisse‘s announcement said it would pay the Department of Justice a $2.48 billion civil monetary penalty. The bank will also provide $2.8 billion in consumer relief over five years as part of the deal, which is subject to negotiations over final documentation and approval by Credit Suisse’s board of directors. [Credit Suisse owns SPS Portfolio Servicing.]

Ocwen Settles with 10 States for Illegal Servicing

“The consent order provides that Ocwen will transition its servicing portfolio off of its current servicing platform to a platform better able to manage escrow accounts and establish a new complaint resolution process,” the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance said in a press release. “Ocwen shall hire a third-party firm to audit a statistically significant number of escrow accounts in high-risk areas of the portfolio to determine whether problems continue to exist around the management of escrow accounts and to identify the root cause of those problems.

“Ocwen has faced many legal and regulatory challenges in recent years. In December 2013 it reached a settlement over foreclosure and modification processes with the CFPB and state regulators. A year later, it made a separate agreement with New York regulators that removed company founder William Erbey as CEO.

Wells Fargo Whistleblower is Fired Among Others Who refused to Lie to Customers

In 2014, according to Mr. Tran, his boss ordered him to lie to customers who were facing foreclosure. When Mr. Tran refused, he said, he was fired. He worried that he wouldn’t be able to make his monthly mortgage payments and that he was about to become homeless.

Joining a cadre of former employees claiming they were mistreated for speaking out about problems at the bank, Mr. Tran sued. He argued in court filings that he had been fired in retaliation for blowing the whistle on misconduct at the giant San Francisco-based bank. Mr. Tran said he didn’t want his job back — he wanted Wells Fargo to admit that it had been wrong to fire him and wrong to mislead customers who were facing foreclosure.

 

 

 

Filed under: CORRUPTION, currency, foreclosure, TILA | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments »

The Mains Event: Demand that Attorney Generals Nationwide comply with LPS/Black Knight Consent Judgement

Posted on August 4, 2017 by Neil Garfield

 

Please listen to the West Coast Foreclosure Show.  Attorney Charles Marshall interviews former FDIC team leader Eric Mains about his foreclosure battle and FOIA strategy.

By K.K. MacKinstry

Anyone who knows former FDIC Team Leader Eric Mains knows he is one tenacious ex-banker.  In eight years of litigation, every court he has approached for relief has stonewalled his efforts to discover who owns his mortgage loan.  Mains is still in his home despite Chase’s most recent Motion to Dismiss that was granted by the United States District Court based on Rooker-Feldman doctrine that shouldn’t have applied due to the fact neither the parties or subject matter of his federal complaint was covered in his State foreclosure action.

It is astonishing that Mains has not prevailed in his lawsuit against CitiBank and Chase.  In his lawsuits, he has variously provided evidence of the following:

– His Note was “endorsed” in blank and undated with stamp of one Cynthia Riley, a former WAMU employee laid off from her job at WAMU before his note was endorsed, and whose FL deposition in 2013 revealed she never worked at the SC facility his loan documents were sent to, never personally endorsed any notes herself, and her stamps were not located at the SC facility.

-Whistleblower Lynn Syzmoniak’s qui tam lawsuit revealed that one Jodi Sobotta (alleged “attorney in fact” for Chase who signed another of his Note assignments) was in fact a LPS employee in MN who alleged in the qui tam suit to have been involved in unauthorized robosigning and forgery at that facility. Christine Sauerer, notary on the assignment, filed an official notary card with MN which contains her signature, but it does not match her alleged signature on his assignment. Even more damningly, she supposedly notarized the assignment over 1 year before it was recorded in the county recorder’s office. This is an amazing feat as the assignment, ANY loan assignment, would have been sent to the local recorder’s office for recordation directly after execution as a normal course of business to ensure timely recording and priority- as any competent attorney could attest. This is direct evidence the assignment had been back dated as well as forged.

-While the above is incredible enough, it doesn’t end there. The above assignment was one of the assignments that was the subject of a $125 million 2013 multi-state consent judgment with LPS. LPS and its agents, which would have included the attorneys it contracted and retained to instigate the very foreclosures its forged assignments were used in, was required by the CJ to have reached out to consumers affected by their forgeries and remediated their forged assignments executed from 2008-2010, of which Mains was one. Mains foreclosure judgment occurred months after the signing of the CJ, and the foreclosure mill law firm in that case, Nelson & Frankenberger, never disclosed LPS as a material party in discovery, and never disclosed to the court the forgery activity it was aware of.  To this day, they have still proceeded to try multiple times to move forward with sheriffs sales on Mains property using the same forged documents, in violation of the CJ, and while the Indiana AG’s office remains mute.

Mains has appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States his 2017 federal appellate court ruling that their jurisdiction to hear his complaint was barred by the Rooker-Feldman doctrine.  Meanwhile, Mains has continued to seek information in his case, notably through a Freedom of Information Act request, in which he demanded that the Indiana Attorney General’s office provide information regarding the 2013 consent judgement with LPS/Black Knight, and their stated compliance with its terms, which is required to be documented in quarterly reports to the AG’s of all 50 states who were signatories to the settlement.

He requested copies of all the information relevant to the consent judgement, and he specifically requested copies of the all compliance reports the AG’s office held and was to have received from LPS/Black Knight. Mains wanted to know what LPS/Black Knight was doing to comply with the consent judgement to stop its stipulated to unauthorized signing of loan documents, the use of those documents, and most basically what their compliance activities consisted of. This is just common sense, as any Indiana consumer, homeowner, legislator, or attorney would expect to be apprised of the what, where, when, and how of LPS/Black Knight’s compliance with the CJ…. especially after paying the IN AG’s office $1.6 million to settle it violations!

After Mains sent his FOIA to the AG’s office he received a pathetically anemic response.  The AG ignored most of his request and were only willing to disclose 19 pages of documents. The 7 page CJ itself, and 12 supposed cover letters to the compliance reports and the original complaint.  That is it!!!!  Mains has indicated his suspicion that the compliance reports either don’t exist, or they fail to address the requirements of the consent judgements.

The IN AG has generally claimed that everything in relation to the settlement and information related to it is attorney work product or is somehow privileged/confidential.  This is patently ridiculous and violates the Indiana Public Records Act.  The various state AG’s offices are required to follow up on the consent judgement until January of 2018.  Mains wants to know what the state AG’s have done to protect consumers and ensure the compliance with the terms of the 2013 CJ, especially after taking millions of dollars of LPS money for that privilege. He encourages consumers and the media to do the same in each of their respective states given the danger that state AG’s are still knowingly and negligently allowing these fraudulent documents to be used in foreclosures in their states despite the 2013 CJ specifically prohibiting this conduct.

Look for Part II on Monday regarding how you can benefit from your own FOIAs, what you can do to help others, and why it matters.

Filed under: foreclosure | Tagged: , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

Another PennyMac Crash! CA Case for Homeowner

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Neil Garfield

American jurisprudence is clearly still struggling with the fact that in most cases the forecloser either does not exist or does not have any interest in the loans they seek to enforce. In virtually all instances PennyMac is acting in the role of a sham conduit while allowing its name to be used as the front for a nonexistent lender.

Such foreclosers use semantics and legal procedure to create and cover-up the illusion of “ownership” of the debt (the loan) and the illusion of having the rights to enforce the note bestowed by a true creditor. This case opinion is correct in every respect and it conforms with basic black letter law in all 50 states; yet courts still strive to find ways to allow disinterested parties to foreclose.

Get a consult and Chain of Title Analysis! 202-838-6345
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THIS ARTICLE IS NOT A LEGAL OPINION UPON WHICH YOU CAN RELY IN ANY INDIVIDUAL CASE. HIRE A LAWYER.
—————-
Hat tip to Bill Paatalo
see GULIEX v. PennyMAC HOLDINGS LLC, Cal: Court of Appeal, 5th Appellate Dist. 2017 https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9436462246811997539&hl=en&lr=lang_en&as_sdt=2006&as_vis=1&oi=scholaralrt
This case amply demonstrates the following:
  1. The need for a chain of title report
  2. The need for a chain of title analysis
  3. The need for legal research and good memorandums of law
  4. The need to understand “chains of title” or “chains of events” and the laws applicable thereto (e.g. judicial notice, legal presumptions etc.)
  5. The need to formulate a presentation to the judge that is very persuasive.
  6. The need to appeal when trial judges don’t apply the law or don’t apply the law correctly.

The following are significant quotes from the case.

Plaintiff, a homeowner and borrower, sued the defendant financial institution for wrongs allegedly committed in connection with a nonjudicial foreclosure sale of his residence. Plaintiff’s main theory was that the financial institution did not own his note and deed of trust and, therefore, lacked the authority to foreclose under the deed of trust. (e.s.)

The financial institution convinced the trial court that (1) it was, in fact, the beneficiary under the deed of trust, (2) a properly appointed substitute trustee conducted the foreclosure proceedings, and (3) the plaintiff lacked standing to claim the foreclosure was wrongful. The financial institution argued its chain of title to the deed of trust was established by facts stated in recorded assignments of deed of trust and a recorded substitution of trustee. The trial court took judicial notice of the recorded documents. Based on these documents, the court sustained a demurrer to some of the causes of action and granted summary judgment as to the remaining causes of action. On appeal, plaintiff contends he has standing to challenge the foreclosure and, furthermore, the judicially noticed documents do not establish the financial institution actually was the beneficiary under the deed of trust. We agree. (e.s.)

As to standing, the holding in Yvanova v. New Century Mortgage Corp. (2016) 62 Cal.4th 919 (Yvanova) clearly establishes plaintiff has standing to challenge the nonjudicial foreclosure on the ground that the foreclosing party lacked the authority to initiate the foreclosure because it held no beneficial interest under the deed of trust. (e.s.)

As to establishing facts by judicial notice, it is well recognized that courts may take notice of the existence and wording of recorded documents, but not the disputed or disputable facts stated therein. (e.s.) (Yvanova, supra, 62 Cal.4th at p. 924, fn. 1; Herrera v. Deutsche Bank National Trust Co. (2011) 196 Cal.App.4th 1366, 1375 (Herrera).) Under this rule, we conclude the facts stated in the recorded assignments of deed of trust and the substitution of trustee were not subject to judicial notice. (e.s.) Therefore, the financial institution did not present evidence sufficient to establish its purported chain of title to the deed of trust. Consequently, the financial institution failed to show it was the owner of the deed of trust and had the authority to foreclose on plaintiff’s residence.

We therefore reverse the judgment and remand for further proceedings.

….

The Links in PennyMac’s Purported Chain of Title

“Links” in a chain of title are created by a transfer of an interest in the underlying property from one person or entity to another. An examination of each link in the purported chain of title relied upon by PennyMac reveals that certain links were not established for purposes of the demurrer. Our analysis begins with a description of each link in the purported chain (and each related document, where known), beginning with the husband and wife who sold the residence to Borrower and ending with the trustee’s sale to PennyMac.

Link One-Sale: Clarence and Betty Dake sold the residence to Borrower pursuant to a grant deed dated April 19, 2005, and recorded on June 30, 2005. The parties do not dispute this transfer.

Link Two-Loan: Borrower granted a beneficial interest in the residence to Long Beach Mortgage Company pursuant to a deed of trust dated June 21, 2005, and recorded on June 30, 2005. The parties do not dispute this transfer.

Link Three-Purported Transfer: Long Beach Mortgage Company purportedly transferred its rights to Washington Mutual Bank by means of a document or transaction not identified in the appellate record. Also, the appellate record does not identify when the purported transaction occurred. Borrower disputes the existence of this and subsequent transfers of the deed of trust. (e.s.)

Link Four-Purported Transfer: Washington Mutual Bank purportedly transferred its rights to JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association in an unidentified transaction at an unstated time. (e.s.)

Link Five-Assignment: JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association, successor in interest to Washington Mutual Bank, successor in interest to Long Beach Mortgage Company, purportedly transferred the note and all beneficial interest under the deed of trust to “JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association” pursuant to an assignment of deed of trust dated July 25, 2011, and recorded on July 26, 2011.

Link Six(A)-Assignment: JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association transferred all beneficial interest in the deed of trust to PennyMac Mortgage Investment Trust Holdings I, LLC pursuant to a “California Assignment of Deed of Trust” dated September 14, 2013, and recorded on November 15, 2013.

Link Seven-Trustee’s Sale: California Reconveyance Company, as trustee under the deed of trust, (1) sold the residence to PennyMac at a public auction conducted on November 20, 2013, and (2) issued a trustee’s deed of sale dated November 21, 2013 and recorded on November 22, 2013. PennyMac, the grantee under the deed upon sale, was described in the deed as the foreclosing beneficiary.

Link Six(B)-Purported Assignment: The day after the trustee’s sale, JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association executed a “Corporate Assignment of Deed of Trust” dated November 21, 2013, purporting to transfer the deed of trust without recourse to PennyMac Holdings, LLC. The assignment was recorded November 22, 2013. This assignment was signed (1) after JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association had signed and recorded the “California Assignment of Deed of Trust” described earlier as Link Six(A) and (2) after the trustee’s sale was conducted on November 20, 2013. Consequently, it is unclear whether any interests were transferred by this “corporate” assignment.

3. Links Three and Four Are Missing from the Chain

Postscript from Editor: This Court correctly revealed the fraudulent strategy of the banks, to wit: they created the illusion of multiple transfers giving the appearance of a solid chain of title BUT 2 of the transfers were fake, leaving the remainder of the chain void.

Filed under: foreclosure | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 13 Comments »

Corrupt Bank Leaders Call Out for Ethics and Accountability

Posted on July 6, 2017 by Neil Garfield
Update 7/7/2017 2:48 Eastern: Governanceprinciples.com website is down.  It appears that the website lasted as long as the members commitment to ethics and accountability.

See:  http://www.governanceprinciples.org has expired and is pending renewal or deletion.
Renew Now
Backorder Domain

governanceprinciples.org

By K.K. MacKinstry/LendingLies
Editor’s Note:  Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase demanding that banks act ethically and with accountability is the equivalent of El Chapo Guzman advocating for drug education programs and stronger drug laws. 
Big banks, Big media, Big pharma, Big chemical/oil, and Big Gov are well aware that stakeholders are beyond furious.  If Mr. Dimon is concerned about acting ethically, I suggest homeowners victimized by JPMorgan Chase organize and present him with a letter demanding an explanation for knowingly foreclosing on loans that were never transferred from WaMu. 

These “esteemed” CEOs may pay lip service to transparency, long-term value creation, and ethical policies but the corporations they represent are the antithesis of ethical behavior.  This is nothing but a public relations stunt designed to create the appearance of giving a damn while the unethical, fraudulent and illegal practices continue.  The Germans rioting in Hamburg at the G20 Summit are doing so because western governments (globalist corporations) are no longer listening to their citizens, but catering to corporate interests.

By Richard Bowen/CitiBank Whistleblower
And it’s about time…principles matter; in business and in our personal lives. For some time you’ve heard me rant on the lack of principles exhibited by many companies and the TBTF banks that endangered our economy in 2008; the lack of principles that eroded our financial systems and the fraud that resulted because of the lack of ethics and accompanying greed. Companies pay lip service to governance, principles and ethics and often pay them no heed in their relentless pursuit of profit.

Principles matter, yet they cannot be just words on paper, mandated from the top and not followed by a company’s leaders which is what occurred with the ethics policies that Enron, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and countless others proclaimed they had. 

So it was with some surprise that I read about a group of thirteen or so well known CEO’s and heads of investment firms which had teamed up last year to develop “common sense standards for corporate governance.” The venture, which was kept quiet for some time included JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffet, General Motors CEO Mary Barra, and the CEO’s of Verizon, General Electric, Vanguard, Blackrock, and others.

It may be just a little and too late, still, it’s worth paying attention to see what if any changes this group and their initiative can make on the present sad state of corporate values, shareholder and director policies and overall corporate governance. In an open letter and nine-page document on the group’s website they state, “Corporate governance in recent years has often been an area of intense debate among investors, corporate leaders and other stakeholders. Yet, too often, that debate has generated more heat than light.” 

Among other items, the group is behind “clawback provisions,” board diversity, and fair director compensation models designed to keep director goals more in line with those of company investors.

Several governance experts and institutional investors have applauded the effort as a “call to action for U.S. companies, large and small.” Ken Daly, CEO, National Association of Corporate Directors, is one of them, and says, “We are pleased to see that the principles supported by this esteemed group promote the same concepts of transparency, long-term value creation, and independent board leadership that NACD champions. … Our robust portfolio of governance resources—developed for directors, by directors—can assist boards in implementing these practices.”

Yet, some believe as do I that this group, which wields tremendous power, can go even further on several issues that have proved contentious to effective governance, such as splitting the CEO’s and Chairman’s roles, proxy access and director retirement age. I was glad to see the group was by and large not in favor of dual-class voting (in which people with a privileged category of shares get more say than the average investor). The group said, “If a company has dual-class voting, which sometimes is intended to protect the company from short-term behavior, the company should consider having specific sunset provisions based upon time or a triggering event, which eliminate dual-class voting.”

One recommendation which obviously met with my approval was, “that the board of a public company should be able to meet with any employees outside of the presence of the chief executive to get an unvarnished view of the way the company is being run.”

 

In their open letter, they state:

The health of America’s public corporations and financial markets — and public trust in both — is critical to economic growth and a better financial future for American workers, retirees and investors.

Millions of American families depend on these companies for work — our 5,000 public companies account for a third of the nation’s private sector jobs.

Our future depends on these companies being managed effectively for long-term prosperity, which is why the governance of American companies is so important to every American. Corporate governance in recent years has often been an area of intense debate among investors, corporate leaders and other stakeholders

We represent some of America’s largest corporations, as well as investment managers, that, as fiduciaries, represent millions of individual savers and pension beneficiaries.

This diverse group certainly holds varied opinions on corporate governance. But we share the view that constructive dialogue requires finding common ground — a starting point to foster the economic growth that benefits shareholders, employees and the economy as a whole. To that end, we have worked to find commonsense principles.

We offer these principles, which can be found at http://www.governanceprinciples.org, in the hope that they will promote further conversation on corporate governance.

While some of the companies represented have been humbled by their own ethical lapses resulting in high-profile whistleblowing (e.g., Alayne Fleishmann with Chase mortgage securitizations and Courtland Kelley with GM safety issues), the group nonetheless does have the capacity to implement much more on the issues of ethics and sound corporate governance, and I still give them credit and respect for this beginning. If other corporate leaders stood their ground and actually followed the high road and embraced it in their culture, we would all benefit.

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JPMorgan Chase Bombshell: The Mortgage Liens were Released and then Foreclosed anyways

Posted on June 26, 2017 by Neil Garfield

Transcript Reveals How JPM Chase “Got away with it” — selling loans that were already sold, releasing liens and then foreclosing on nonexistent liens

Get a consult! 202-838-6345
https://www.vcita.com/v/lendinglies to schedule CONSULT, leave message or make payments.
THIS ARTICLE IS NOT A LEGAL OPINION UPON WHICH YOU CAN RELY IN ANY INDIVIDUAL CASE. HIRE A LAWYER.
—————-

Hat Tip to Brent Tantillo, Esq.

In our Thursday broadcast of the Neil Garfield Show Mr. Tantillo offered to send us the transcript of a deposition of the person who was in charge of monitoring the National mortgage Settlement and compliance with restrictions and rules concerning the execution of the settlements that were under the purview of the witness.  The transcript shows a continuation of the pattern of setting the illusion of a monitor when in fact the regulator (monitor in this case) was either forced or allowed to rely upon reports generated from Chase.

While somewhat daunting for those who can fall asleep easily while reading, this deposition is very important for those who really want and need more insight into how nearly everything JPM Chase did or said was a carefully constructed lie designed to defraud investors and homeowners who were subjected to foreclosures by parties affiliated with JPMorgan Chase, who had no interest in the loans, while the investors, and the “owners” of derivative hedge products were left holding virtually nothing.

As Mr. Tantillo described on last Thursday’s show, there was major hidden detail to this particular part of the overall fraudulent scheme in which claims were false predicated upon securitization: the mortgage liens were released. Thus while JPMorgan Chase was having lawyers sue in foreclosure on a mortgage lien, it was for “other purposes” releasing and satisfying the liens in order to escape regulations that would have cost money.   By lying on both ends of the stick they got the best of both worlds — until Brent Tantillo came along and filed suit on behalf of the investors who were defrauded.

Brent Tantillo’s contact information is as follows:
Tantillo Law
Attorney Brent Tantillo
Phone: 954-617-8188

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Investigator Bill Paatalo BlockBuster Finding: WaMu Investor Code “AO1″ Revealed – Chase Stipulates It Represents “WaMu Asset Acceptance Corp.”

Posted on June 19, 2017 by Neil Garfield
 http://bpinvestigativeagency.com/wamu-investor-code-ao1-revealed-chase-stipulates-it-represents-wamu-asset-acceptance-corp/

(DISCLOSURE: This article is not intended to be construed as legal advice. Seek advice from a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction regarding any of the information provided below.)

High praise to Attorney Ron Freshman in San Diego, CA and his paralegal Kimberly Cromwell who recently obtained this remarkable “Stipulation of Fact” from JPMorgan Chase Bank’s counsel. (See #8 – Chase Stipulated Fact – AO1 – WMAAC).  Last November, I wrote the following article seeking the identity of private investor “AO1.” (See: http://bpinvestigativeagency.com/who-is-private-investor-ao1-jpmorgan-chase-refuses-to-reveal-the-identity-of-this-investor/).

Thanks to the aggressive prosecution and discovery efforts put forth by Attorney Freshman and his team, the answer has now been revealed. JPMorgan Chase’s counsel has stipulated in paragraph #8, “Investor code AO1 in the Loan Transfer History File represents WaMu Asset Acceptance Corporation.”

Folks, I have opined against Chase for years now that this investor code does not signify “banked owned” loans on the “books of Washington Mutual Bank,” but rather a securitization subsidiary of Washington Mutual, Inc. I’ve been attacked by Chase who has argued vehemently that my opinion is simply dead wrong, and has sought to have my testimony stricken. Well it appears as though I’ve now  been vindicated! This stipulated fact runs contrary to Chase’s long standing position, in thousands of foreclosures across the United States, that it acquired “AO1″ loans because they were “on the books” of  “Washington Mutual Bank” per the Purchase & Assumption Agreement (PAA) with the FDIC. This has been a lie, as these “AO1″ loans could not have been a part of the PAA due to the sale and securitization of said loans by WMB through its “off-balance sheet activities.” More so, Chase’s use of the FIRREA argument against homeowners for loans not on WMB’s books may have suffered a tremendous blow here.

It has long been my opinion that testimony put forth by Chase witnesses, like the following by Peter Katsikas, have been downright false. Again, more vindication. Here’s what Katsikas had to say under oath regarding investor code “AO1″:

PETER KATSIKAS,

called as a witness, having been duly sworn, testified as follows:

(Beginning – P. 43):

Q. And do you know whether or not at the time of the acquisition of the assets that are identified in the purchase and assumption agreement with the FDIC to Chase dated September 2008, did it include a list of the loans that Chase was acquiring?

A. I mean, I didn’t see an actual list, but there’s — it’s in the system. It’s in the MSP servicing — that’s a system the bank uses to service the accounts.

Q. Is it your testimony that the Freeman loans were owned by Washington Mutual F.A. at the time the bank failed?

A. Yes.

Q. Is it your testimony that Washington Mutual Bank or some subsidiary of the bank was not servicing those loan at the time?

MR. HERMAN: Can you read that back, please.

(Question read)

MR. HERMAN: At what time?

MR. WRIGHT: Prior to September 25, 2008, between the time they were made and September 25, 2008.

A. The servicer was Washington Mutual F.A.

Q. Okay. Was there an investor?

A. It was bank-owned. It’s always been bank-owned.

Q. It’s always been bank-owned?

A. Correct.

Q. And you know that because?

A. I reviewed Chase’s books and records.

Q. What in the books and records would indicate to you that it was

bank-owned versus not bank-owned?

A. Well, they’re through the investor screens and also the ID codes,investor ID codes.

Q. Okay. And the ID codes are letters, aren’t they?

MR. HERMAN: Objection.

A. They consist of letters and numerals.

Q. Okay. And what letters would indicate an investor?

A. There’s three digits or three characters.

Q. Two letters and a number?

A. No, it could be a mixture of.

Q. So what three characters — well, let’s put it another way. What characters would indicate a Chase-owned asset — a WaMu-owned asset?

Excuse me.

A. For these two loans?

Q. Yes.

A. AO1.

Q. AO1?

A. Yeah.

Q. And that AO1 stands for what?

A. That’s just the three digit code, which is bank-owned.

Q. AO1?

A. Uh-huh.

(Recess)

Katsikas Depo Transcript

Bill Paatalo – Private Investigator – OR PSID# 49411
BP Investigative Agency, LLC
P.O. Box 838
Absarokee, MT 59001
Office: (406) 328-4075

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The Neil Garfield Radio Show at 6pm Eastern: JPMorgan Chase operates a Racketeering Enterprise according to Plaintiffs

Posted on June 8, 2017 by Neil Garfield

The Neil Garfield Show LIVE today at 6 pm Eastern/3 pm Pacific.  Join us!

Thursdays LIVE! Click in to the The Neil Garfield Show

Or call in at (347) 850-1260, 6pm Eastern Thursdays

For a copy of the LIST OF LOANS involved in the RICO lawsuit Click the following link: First Fidelity loans purchased from Chase

For a copy of this case click here: RICO Complaint – Chase

JPMorgan Chase has been accused of creating a “racketeering enterprise” whose purpose was to evade legal duties owed to borrowers, regulators and Plaintiffs, among others, to appropriately service federally regulated mortgage loans.  Basically, JPMorgan Chase cannot provide the necessary documentation to the Plaintiff’s regarding the loans they purchased, while borrowers whose loans were sold to JPMorgan Chase cannot obtain proof regarding the ownership of their loans (likely because all documentation was intentionally destroyed). The loans are void without the proper documentation (notes, reconveyances and assignments).   It is noteworthy, that when JPMorgan Chase went to foreclose on the “loans” with no legitimate documentation,  they would use entities like Nationwide Title Clearing to create false title and paperwork necessary to foreclose or to attach to a proof of claim in bankruptcy.

This blockbuster lawsuit illuminates the fact that JPMorgan Chase was selling thousands of loans it didn’t own including loans it had previously sold to other MBS trusts!  It is alleged that Chase transferred these defective “loans” in order to avoid non-reimbursable advances and expenses.

S&A Capital Mortgage Partners, Mortgage Resolution Servicing and 1st Fidelity Loan Servicing are suing JPMorgan Chase in the Southern District of New York District court for failure to service loans in a manner consistent with its legal obligations under: RESPA, TILA, FTC violations, the FDCPA, The Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Fair Housing Act; and other applicable state and federal usury, consumer credit protection and privacy, predatory and abusive lending laws (collectively “the Acts”).  It is likely that this is not an isolated incident, but JPMorgan Chase’s normal operational standard.

The Plaintiffs complain that JPMC, rather than comply with the costly and time consuming legal obligations it faced under the Acts, the Defendants warehoused loans in a database of charged-off loans known as RCV1 and intentionally and recklessly sold these liabilities to unaware buyers such as the Plaintiffs.

To accomplish the transfer of these obligations Defendants prevented Plaintiff’s from conducting normal due diligence, failure to provide information, and changing terms of transactions after consummation; as well as failure to transfer mortgages to them. Because the Plaintiff’s did not receive the information about the loans purchased, the Defendants tortuously interfered with the Plantiff’s relationships with the borrowers including illegally sending borrowers debt forgiveness letters and releasing liens.   These actions not only resulted in specific damage to said lien’s value, but caused Plaintiffs reputational harm with borrowers, loan sellers, investors, lenders and regulators.

In reality both investors and borrowers should unite and sue JPMorgan Chase for Fraud and Fraudulent Inducement, Tortious Interference with Business Relations, conversion, breach of contract, and promissory estoppel and additional relief.

Highlights from the case include these bombshells accusing JPMorgan Chase of:

(iv) Knowingly breached every representation they made in the MLPA, including failing to legally transfer 3,529 closed-end 1st lien mortgages worth $156,324,399.24 to the Plaintiffs, and to provide Plaintiffs with the information required by both RESPA and the MMLSA so that Plaintiffs could legally service said loans.

(v) Took numerous actions post-facto that tortiously interfered with Plaintiffs’ relationships with borrowers including illegally sending borrowers debt forgiveness letters and releasing liens.

RCV1 Evades Regulatory Standards and Servicing Requirements

  1. Defendants routinely and illicitly sought to avoid costly and time-consuming servicing of federally related mortgage loans. Since 2000, Defendants maintained loans on various mortgage servicing Systems of Records (“SOR”) which are required to meet servicing standards and regulatory mandates. However, Defendants installed RCV1, an off-the-books system of records to conduct illicit practices outside the realm of regulation or auditing. Defendants’ scheme involves flagging defaulted and problem federally related loans on the legitimate SOR and installing a subsequent process to then identify and transfer the loan records from the legitimate SOR to RCV1. The process could be disguised as a reporting process within the legitimate SOR and the data then loaded to the RCV1 repository on an ongoing basis undetected by federal regulators.
  2. Defendants inactivated federally related mortgage loans from their various SORs such as from the Mortgage Servicing Platform (“MSP”) and Vendor Lending System (“VLS”).

 

  1. RCV1’s design and functionality does not meet any servicing standards or requirements under applicable federal, state, and local laws pertaining to mortgage servicing or consumer protection. Instead, the practices implemented by Defendants on the RCV1 population are focused on debt collection.

 

  1. Defendants seek to maximize revenue through a scheme of flagging, inactivating, and then illicitly housing charged-off problematic residential mortgage loans in the vacuum of RCV1, improperly converting these problematic residential mortgage loans into purely debt collection cases that are akin to bad credit card debt, and recklessly disregarding virtually all servicing obligations in the process. In order to maximize revenue, Defendants used unscrupulous collection methods on homeowners utilizing third-party collection agencies and deceptive sales tactics on unsuspecting note sale investors, all the while applying for governmental credits and feigning compliance with regulatory standards.

 

  1. In short, the RCV1 is where mortgage loans and associated borrowers are intentionally mishandled in such a manner that compliance with any regulatory requirements is impossible. In derogation of the RESPA, which requires mortgage servicers to correct account errors and disclose account information when a borrower sends a written request for information, the information for loans in RCV1 remains uncorrected and is sent as an inventory list from one collection agency to another, progressively resulting in further degradation of the loan information. In dereliction of various regulations related to loan servicing, loans once in RCV1 are not verified individually and the identity of the true owner of the note per the Truth in Lending Act (TILA) is often concealed. Regulatory controls regarding grace periods, crediting funds properly, charging correct amounts are not followed.

 

  1. More specifically, a borrower sending a qualified written request under Section 6 of RESPA concerning the servicing of his/her loan or request for correction under 12 U.S.C. §2605(e), 12 CFR §1024.35 could not obtain resolution because RCV1 is a repository for housing debt rather than a platform for housing and servicing federally related loans. RCV1 contains no functionalities for accounting nor escrow management in contravention of §10 of RESPA, Regulation X, 12 CFR §1024.34.

 

In contravention of 12 CFR §1024.39, Chase failed to inform Borrowers whose loans were flagged, inactivated, and housed in RCV1, about the availability of loss mitigation options, and in contravention of 12 CFR §1024.40. Chase also failed to make available to each Borrower personnel assigned to him/her to apprise the Borrower of the actions the Borrower must take, status of any loss mitigation application, circumstances under which property would be referred to foreclosure, or applicable loss mitigation deadlines in careless disregard of any of the loss mitigation procedures under Reg X 12 CFR § 1024.41.

 

  1. Unbeknownst to Plaintiffs and regulatory agencies, Chase has systematically used RCV1 to park flagged loans inactivated in the MSP, VLS, and other customary SORs to (1) eschew Regulatory requirements while publicly assuring compliance, (2) request credits and insurance on the charge-offs., (3) continue collection, and (4) sell-off these problematic loans to unsuspecting investors to maximize profit/side-step liability, all with the end of maximizing profit.

 

Specifics of Defendants’ RICO Scheme and Conduct:

  1. Since at least 2000, Defendants evaded their legal obligations and liabilities with respect to the proper servicing of federally related mortgages, causing Plaintiffs damage through Defendants’ misconduct from their scheme to violate:
  • The Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA);
  • The Truth in Lending Act (TILA);
  • The Federal Trade Commission Act (FTC);
  • The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA);
  • The Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank);
  • The Equal Credit Opportunity Act; and
  • The Fair Housing Act.
  1. After Plaintiffs acquired mortgage loans from Defendants, during the period 2011 through at least 2016, Defendants released thousands of liens related to RCV1 loans, including RCV1 loans Defendants no longer owned, to avoid detection of non-compliance with the Lender Settlements. These lien releases caused harm to the Plaintiffs and to numerous other note sale investors.

 

  1. Similarly, in September 2008, Chase Bank entered into an agreement with the FDIC as receiver for WAMU-Henderson. Chase Bank made a number of representations in its agreement with the FDIC, including that Chase Bank and its subsidiaries were in compliance with all applicable federal, state and local laws. However, at the time of execution and delivery of the agreement, Chase owned thousands of loans with respect to which, through its improper servicing and other misconduct relating to the RCV1, it was in violation of many federal and state laws. These circumstances created a further motive for Chase Bank to participate in the scheme to transfer thousands of noncompliant loans to Plaintiffs and others.

 

  1. Plaintiff MRS purchased loans from Chase pursuant to the MLPA that were actually Chase’s most problematic loans and mostly housed in the RCV1 repository. In March, 2009, bare notes and deeds, without the promised required loan files documenting servicing and borrower information, were simply shipped to Plaintiffs as the “loan files”. Plaintiffs also received loans for which no notes, deeds or loan files were provided at all. Nevertheless, Defendants kept promising that the complete loan files were forthcoming, with no intent of ever providing them. Without the necessary documentation, it was difficult or impossible for Plaintiffs to service and collect on the loans. And despite herculean efforts, most often Plaintiffs could not locate the necessary information to service and collect on the loans.

 

  1. Defendants’ plan to entice an existing and approved, but unsuspecting note sale buyer to purchase these toxic loans is in plain view in various recently produced email exchanges discussing Defendant’s fraudulent scheme to dump non-serviced loans with inadequate documentation on Plaintiffs from October 2008 through February 2009.

 

  1. As early as 2008, Defendants’ knew the public was becoming more aware of its the scope of its improper actions. Ultimately, in 2012, public pressure prompted the federal government and many states to bring a complaint against JPMorgan and Chase Bank, as well as other banks responsible for fraudulent and unfair mortgage practices that cost consumers, the federal government, and the states tens of billions of dollars. The complaint alleged that JPMorgan and Chase Bank, as well as other financial institutions, engaged in improper practices related to mortgage origination, mortgage servicing, and foreclosures, including, but not limited to, irresponsible and inadequate oversight of the banks’ quality control standards. Unfortunately, the complaint failed to note, and the government appeared unaware of, the Defendants’ deeper institutional directives designed to hide their improprieties (such as the establishment of the RCV1 and its true purpose).

 

  1. 48. At all applicable times, Defendants had been continuing to utilize its RCV1 database.

 

  1. However, as in 2008, the loans housed in the RCV1 repository presented a huge reputational risk and legal liability as the loans housed in RCV1 were not being treated as federally related mortgage loans, were not in compliance, were no longer being serviced as such, but were being collected upon.

 

  1. By 2012, the RCV1 database contained hundreds of thousands of federally related mortgage loans, which had been inactivated in regular systems of records and whose accounts were no longer tracked pursuant to regulatory requirements, including escrow accounting.

 

  1. Other knowing participants in the conspiracy include third party title clearing agencies, such as Nationwide Title Clearing Company (NTC), Pierson Patterson, and LCS Financial Services, who were directed by Defendants to prepare and then file fraudulent lien releases and other documents affecting interests in property. Either these entities were hired to verify liens and successively failed to properly validate the liens before creating documents and lien releases containing false information, or these entities were directed by Chase to create the documents with the information provided by Defendants. In either case, these title clearing agencies which recorded fraudulent releases of liens and related documents in the public record, had independent and separate duty from Defendants to file, under various state laws, all relevant documents only after a good faith proper validation of the liens. Instead these entities deliberately violated their duty of care by knowingly or recklessly filing false lien releases and false documents on properties not owned by Defendants.

 

  1. In many states, the act of creating these documents is considered the unauthorized practice of law. In Florida, where NTC is organized, there is a small exception for title companies who are only permitted to prepare documents and perform other necessary acts affecting the legal title of property where the property in question is to be insured, to fulfill a condition for issuance of a title policy or title insurance commitment by the Insurer or if a separate charge was made for such services apart from the insurance premium of the Insurer. Plaintiffs have not ascertained whether Nationwide Title or any other agencies created documents for Chase as a necessary incident to Chase’s purchase of title insurance in Florida.

 

  1. Chase used Real Time Resolutions, GC Services, and Five Lakes Agency, among other collection agencies, to maximize its own back door revenues on loans that were problematic and had been inactivated/“charged off” and thereby were invisible to regulatory agencies.

 

  1. At all times, Defendants directed the collection of revenue on problematic federal mortgage loans, placing them in succession at third party collection agencies. Those third party collection agencies included:

 

  1. The third-party collection agencies had a duty to verify whether the debts were owned by Chase, offer pre-foreclosure loss mitigation, offer Borrowers foreclosure alternatives, and comply with any of HUD’s quality control directives and knowingly or recklessly failed to do so. The third-party collectors knew that the debts they were collecting at Defendants’ directions were mortgage loans. They also knew they did not have the mechanisms to provide any regulatory servicing. Nonetheless, the third-party collection agencies continued collection on behalf of Chase for RCV1 loans. The collection agencies continued to collect without oversight or verification and did in fact continue collecting on debt on behalf of Defendants, despite the mortgage loans being owned by the Schneider entities. The ongoing collection gave Chase continued windfalls.

 

  1. A September 30, 2014 document shows that as late as September 30, 2014, Defendants had charged-off and ported 699,541 loans into RCV1.

 

  1. Unbeknownst to Plaintiffs, Chase was selling non-compliant and thus no longer “federally related mortgage loans” to Plaintiff which Chase had ported and inactivated within their regulated systems of records but had copied over to a separate data repository solely for the purpose of collecting without servicing.

 

 

  1. Plaintiff MRS was not privy to Defendants’ internal communications of October 30, 2008, which clarify that Chase knew that the loans it was intending to off load onto the Plaintiff were not on the primary system of record and were being provided from the un-serviced repository called RCV1. The information in RCV1 was not complete because it was not a regulated system of record. As indicated by Chase’s communications, Chase purposefully cut and pasted select information where it could from other systems of records to the information in RCV1. Defendants’ emails discuss data from the FORTRACS application, the acronym for Foreclosure Tracking System, which is an automated, loan default tracking application that also handles the loss mitigation, foreclosure processing, bankruptcy monitoring, and whose data would have originally come from a primary system of record. Rather than a normal and customary data tape, Chase was providing a Frankenstein of a data tape, stitched together from a patchwork of questionable information.

 

  1. Despite its representation and warranty that Chase “is the owner of the Mortgage Loans and has full right to transfer the Mortgage Loans,” a significant portion of the loans listed on Exhibit A were not directly owned by Chase.

 

  1. Upon information and belief, some of the loans sold to MRS were RMBS trust loans which Chase was servicing. Chase had transferred these to MRS in order to avoid non-reimbursable advances and expenses. The unlawful transfer of these loans to MRS as part of the portfolio of loans sold under the MLPA aided the Defendants in concealing Regulatory non-compliance and fraud while increasing the liabilities of MRS.

 

  1. Chase committed, inter alia, the following violations of law with respect to the loans sold to MRS: a. Chase transferred the servicing of the mortgage loans to and from multiple unlicensed and unregulated debt collection agencies which lacked the mortgage servicing platforms to account for or service the borrowers’ loan with any accuracy or integrity.

Investigator Bill Paatalo of the BP Investigative Agency points out that allegations in this case support accusations in other lawsuits against JPMorgan Chase including that:

  1. Chase knowingly provided collection agencies with false and misleading information about the borrowers.
  2. Chase failed to provide proper record keeping for escrow accounts.
  3. Chase stripped loan files of most origination documentation, including federal disclosures and good faith estimates, thus putting MRS in a positionwhere it was unable to respond to borrower or regulatory inquiries.
  4. Chase failed to provide any accurate borrower payment histories for any of the loans in theMLPA.
  5. Chase knowingly executed assignments of mortgage to MRS for mortgage loans that Defendants knew had been foreclosed and sold to third parties.
  6. Chase circumvented its own operating procedures and written policies in connection with servicing federally-related mortgage loans by removing the loans from its primary record-keeping platform and creating an entry in its RCV1 repository. This had the effect of denying the borrowers their rights concerning federally related mortgages yet allowed Chase to retain the lien and the benefit of the security interest,
  7. Chase included on Exhibit A loans that it had previously sold to third parties and loans that it had never owned.
  8. Chase knowingly and deliberately changed the loan numbers of numerous valuable loans sold to MRS after the MLPA had been fully executed and in force. This allowed Chase to accept payments from borrowers whose loans had been sold to MRS without its own records disclosing the wrongful acceptance of such payments.
  9. Chase’s failure to provide the assignments of the notes and mortgages was not an act of negligence. As events unfolded, it became clear that Chase failed to provide the assignments of the notes and mortgages because it wanted, in selective instances, to continue to treat the sold loans as its own property.
  10. Chase converted payments from borrowers whose loans it had sold

At what point does the Federal Government take action against these fraudulent practices?  It is likely that ALL major banks are participating in the exact same racketeering enterprises so obvious at JPMorgan Chase.

Bill Paatalo, Private Investigator:
BP Investigative Agency, LLC
P.O. Box 838
Absarokee, MT 59001
Office: (406) 328-4075
Attorney Charles Marshall, Esq.
Law Office of Charles T. Marshall
415 Laurel St., #405
San Diego, CA 92101

 

 

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Not even the Federal Government Can Determine Who owns Your Loan

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Neil Garfield

It was impossible to trace the majority of the mortgage loans on the over 300 homes sold by DSI that were the subject of the FBI investigation; it would have been harder yet to identify individual victims of the fraud given that the mortgages were securitized and traded. (Emphasis added.)

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS NOT A LEGAL OPINION UPON WHICH YOU CAN RELY IN ANY INDIVIDUAL CASE. HIRE A LAWYER.

—————-

Originally posted at http://mortgageflimflam.com
With additional edits by http://4closurefraud.org

“Counter-intuitive” is the way Reynaldo Reyes (Deutschbank VP Asset Management) described it in a taped telephone interview with a borrower who lived in Arizona.  “we only look like the Trustee. The real power lies with the servicers.”

And THAT has been the problem since the beginning. That means “what you think you know is wrong.” This message has been delivered in thousands of courtrooms in millions of cases but Judges refuse to accept it. In fact most lawyers, even those doing foreclosure defense, and even their clients — the so-called borrowers — can’t peel themselves away from what they think they know.

In the quote above it is obvious that the sentencing document reveals at least two things: (1) nobody can trace the loans themselves which in plain English means that nobody can know who loaned the money to begin with in the so-called loan origination” and (2) nobody can trace the ownership of the loans — i.e., the party who is actually losing money due to nonpayment of the loan. Of course this latter point was been creatively obscured by the banks who set up a scheme in which the victims (investors, managed funds, etc.) continue to get payments long after the “borrower” has ceased making payments.

If nobody knows who loaned the money then the presumption that the loan was consummated when the “borrower”signed documents placed in front of them is wrong for two reasons: (1) all borrowers sign loan documents before funding is approved which means that no loan is consummated when the documents are signed. and (2) there is no evidence that the “originator” funded the loans (regardless of whether it is a bank or some fly by night operation that went bust years ago) loaned any money to the “borrower.” (read the articles contained in the link above).

The reason why I put quotation marks around the word borrower is this: if I don’t lend you money then how are you a borrower, even if you sign loan papers? The courts have nearly universally got this wrong in virtually all of their pretrial rulings and trial rulings. Their attitude is that there must have been a loan and the homeowner must be a borrower because obviously there was a loan. What they means is that since money hit the closing table or the last “lender” received a payoff there must have been a loan. What else would you call it?

Certainly the homeowner meant for it to be a loan. The problem is that the originator did not intend for it to be a loan because they were not lending any money. The originator played the traditional part of a conduit (see American Brokers CONDUIT for example). The originator was paid a fee for the use of their name and traditionally sold the homeowner on taking a loan through the friendly people at XYZ Speedy No Fault Lending, Inc. (a corporation that often does not exist).

Somebody else sent money but it wasn’t a loan to the homeowner. It was the underwriter who was masquerading as the Master Servicer for a Trust that also does not exist. Where did the underwriter get the money? Certainly not from its own pockets. It took money from a dynamic dark pool that should not exist, according to the false “securitization” documents (Prospectus and Pooling and Servicing Agreement).

Who deposited the money into the dark pool? The sellers of fake “mortgage-backed securities”who took money from pension funds and other managed funds under the false pretense that the money would be under management of a specific REMIC Trust that in actuality does not exist, never conducted business under any name, never had a bank account, and for which the Trustee had no duties except window dressing to make it look good to investors. How is that possible? NY law allows for the documentation of a trust without any registration. The Trust does not exist in the eyes of the law unless there is something in it. This like a stick figure is not a person.

None of the money from investors went into any Trust account or any account of any trustee to be held and managed for a REMIC Trust. Sound crazy? It is crazy, but it is also true which is why it is impossible for even the Federal Government with virtually limitless resources cannot tell you who loaned you any money nor who owns any debt from you.

The money was surreptitiously deposited into hundreds of dark pools in institutions around the world. The actual business of the dark pols was to create the illusion of profits for the banks and a huge dark reserve that siphoned some $5 trillion out of the U.S. economy and more out of other economies around the world.

To cover their tracks, the banks took some of the money from the dark pool and started a chain reaction of offering what appeared to be loans but which in most cases were financial death sentences.

The investors, for sure, have a potential claim against the homeowners who received actual benefit from a flow of funds, but without being named in the loan documents, they have no direct right of foreclosure. And then there is the problem of coming up with the correct list of investors whose money was commingled with hundreds of fake trusts. The investors know that collectively, as a group they are owed money from homeowners as a group. But NOBODY KNOWS which investors match up with what alleged loan. The homeowner can ONLY be a “borrower” if they executed a loan contract and the contract became enforceable because there was offer, acceptance and consideration flowing both ways. Without all four legs of the stool it collapses.

Judges resist this “gift” to homeowners while ignoring and accepting the consequence of a gift of enormous proportions to the few banks at the top who started all this. Somehow word has spread that the middle and lower class is the right place to put the burden of this illegal bank behavior.

The homeowner’s offer of consideration is the promise to pay principal sometimes with interest. The originator’s offer of consideration is not to the homeowner. The originator has offered services for a fee to the conduits and sham corporations that put the originator up to selling bad loans from undisclosed third parties to people who lacked the financial knowledge to understand what was happening. So no contract there. No contract? No borrower. No contract? No lender. Hence the term I used back in 2007, “pretender lender.” I should have also coined the term “mock borrower.”

Sound impossible? Here is the finding from the sentencing document:

During the time of the information, DSI worked with two “preferred lenders,” Wells Fargo Bank and J.P. Morgan Chase. Certain employees and managers of those two preferred lenders knew about the incentive programs offered by DSI and the builders, and knew that the incentives were not being disclosed in the loan files. (Emphasis added.)

And that is what we mean by “counter-intuitive.” It is a lie, a cover-up and a fraudulent scheme directed at multiple  victims. Under existing law, foreclosure is not an option for persons who lack standing and have unclean hands. Nearly all loan transactions were table funded and that means, according to TILA, that they are and were predatory loans. And that means, according to me, that it is impossible to allow any equitable relief be had by those who have unclean hands — especially those who seek foreclosure, which is an equitable remedy.

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More Lawsuits, Still No Real Progress and No Coverage by Media

Posted on December 6, 2013 by Neil Garfield

Jon Stewart committed his entire show to the mortgage crisis last Wednesday night. Go watch it. It wasn’t funny although they added some comedic aspects. The bottom line is the question “why aren’t these people in jail?” And the media was scorched with the fact that despite a constant culture of continuing corruption and absurd “transactions” in which paper goes back and forth, and calling that economic activity with”profit,” and stories of the human tragedy of Foreclosures all based on what are now obviously fraudulent schemes, the media is silent. The number of stories on the illegal Foreclosures, the charges of FRAUD by everyone involved from lenders (investors) to insurers to guarantors to borrowers, the verdicts and judgments decided against the banks, and the analysis that the assets of the banks are fictional, the total is ZERO.

My question is why the displacement of more than 15 million people in a single scheme is not the main question in American discourse, media and politics — especially since the banks have admitted by conduct or expressly their wrongdoing? We already know it was a total fraudulent scheme. The banks are settling their ill gotten gains for pennies on the dollar while the victims absorb most of the loss. We already know that the requirements of Federal law were routinely ignored in disclosing the real terms and lenders to borrowers. And if they had made the disclosure, the deals would not have occurred, because if they were disclosed neither the lenders (investors) nor the borrowers (homeowners) would have done the deal.

One particular story was singled out by Jon Stewart to provide an example of what Gretchen Morgenson called “just another day on Wall Street” was the recent transaction between Blackrock and Corere. Blackrock loaned Corere $100 million. Blackrock purchased a credit default swap worth $15 million if there was any default for any reason. Blackrock made a deal with Corere for Corere to default. So Corere defaulted. Blackrock collected the $15 million on the credit default swap PLUS the full repayment from Corere of $100 million, plus interest. Somehow this is considered legal. I call it FRAUD.

When applied to the mortgage market you can easily see how the agent banks (investment banks or broker dealers) made a fortune by creating deals that failed on paper when in fact the loan was already covered in multiple ways. Only in the mortgage situation the lenders got screwed out of repayment and the borrowers got screwed on their deal by either losing their home or getting a deal where they would be underwater for the rest of their lives. As I have been detailing over the last week, I have a currently pending case in which the “successor” trustee with a new aggressive law firm is pursuing foreclosure and collection of rents on loans that they know have been paid, they admit have been paid, but they say it doesn’t matter. Using this theory, if the payment doesn’t come from the named Payor on the note to the now unnamed payee on exhibit note, anyone can collect multiple times on a single debt. This is crazy.

The bastion of our security — judiciary — is succumbing to expediency over truth and justice. Instead of applying the requirements of law and procedure strictly against the same entities that are repeatedly cited for FRAUD AND NON COMPLIANCE by government and lawsuits from investors, insurers and guarantors, the judiciary is ignoring the requirements or applying liberal standards to allow the foreclosure to proceed. What Judges don’t understand yet is that they can clear their docket more quickly if they demand proof of payment by the party seeking foreclosure and proof of authority to represent the real creditors, who must be identified.

If the party pursuing foreclosure has no skin in the game and doesn’t represent anyone who does, the foreclosure fails jurisdictionally. If we apply any other standard, then the courts are opening the door for uninjured people to sue for a slip and fall that happened to someone else.

These Foreclosures would disappear entirely if judges applied the law with or without a proper presentation by defense counsel. In the old days, Judges carefully reviewed the basic documents. If they found a gap, they refused to apply the most extreme remedy of foreclosure until the the creditor could comply. That is all I ask. Instead most lawyers are told to stop arguing because the Judge is uncomfortable with what he is hearing and most lawyers do not have the guts to say to the judge that the purpose of having a lawyer is to “argue” cases. Is the Judge throwing out the right to be heard altogether? That violation of undue process is something that should be taken to task.

At the end of the day, it will be accepted fact that the mortgages were fraudulent unenforceable devices that never should have been recorded, much less used for foreclosure or collection of rents, the note is a fraudulent unenforceable paper designed to mislead the borrower, the lenders, the insurers, the government guarantors, credit default counterparties, and the courts as to the lender’s identity, and the debt was always between the investors who received no documentation for their investment that was real, and the homeowners who were duped into signing papers that made them unwitting participants in a fraudulent scheme.

In the end the intermediary agent banks got paid but the lenders only get their money if they sue the investment banker because the lenders were denied the right to appear on closing paperwork as the lender or on assignments. In other words, the parties who loaned the money got pennies on the dollar. The Banks got paid multiple times on the same debt by selling it multiple times, insuring it multiple times and getting it guaranteed multiple times, and then foreclosing as if they were the lender.

My final question is this: “if we know the mortgage mess was a fraudulent scheme, why are we allowing its continuation in the courts?”

—————————————————–

DOJ plans more MBS fraud cases in New Year

The Department of Justice intends to bring cases against several financial institutions next year for what it says is mortgage-bond fraud, Attorney General Eric Holder told Reuters yesterday.
While Holder said that the DOJ would use JPMorgan’s $13B agreement as a template, he didn’t provide details about which banks are in his crosshairs.
Firms that have acknowledged that they are under investigation include Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C) and Goldman Sachs (GS).

Read more at Seeking Alpha:
http://seekingalpha.com/currents/post/1447021?source=ipadportfolioapp_email

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Filed under: CASES, CDO, CORRUPTION, evidence, expert witness, Fannie MAe, foreclosure, foreclosure mill, GARFIELD KELLEY AND WHITE, investment banking, Investor, MODIFICATION, Mortgage, Motions, Pleading, securities fraud, Servicer, STATUTES, TRUST BENEFICIARIES, trustee | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 112 Comments »

DOJ Probes Wells Fargo: Unravelling the Scam Piece by Piece

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Neil Garfield

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Editor’s Comment and Analysis: For those, like myself, frustrated with the pace of the investigation, we must remember that the convoluted manner in which money and documents were handled was intended to obscure the PONZI scheme at the root of the securitization scam and false claims based upon securitization.

None of us saw anything this complex and after devoting 6 years of life to unraveling this mess I am still learning more each day , even with an extensive background on Wall Street and even with my experience with bond trading, investment banking and related matters.

So first they are going after the low-hanging fruit, which is the obvious misrepresentations to the investors who actually comprise most of the same people who were foreclosed. It was pension funds and retirement accounts managed directly or indirectly by the Wall Street banks that bought these bogus “mortgage-backed” bonds. Those same funds are now underfunded and headed for another bailout fight with the Congress.

The problem is that DOJ is still looking at documents and representations when they should be probing the actual movement of money. It is there that they will find the holy grail of prosecutable crimes. The money just didn’t go the way the banks said it would. The banks took trading profits out of the money before it even landed in an account which incidentally was never titled in the name of the REMIC that issued the fake mortgage bonds backed by loans that did not exist in the “the pool.”

Nonetheless I am encouraged that DOJ is chipping away at this, and getting their feet wet, as they get to understand what was really happening, to wit: a simple PONZI scheme in which the deal would fold as soon as there were no more investments by investors.

This simple core was covered by multiple layers of false documentation, robo-signed documents and other transmissions with disclaimers, such that there would be plausible deniability. In the end it is nothing different than Madoff, Drier or other schemes that have landed many titans in prison for the rest of their lives — unless they died before serving their sentence.

I’m an optimist: I still believe that in the end, these banksters will be brought to  justice for real crimes they committed or were directing through their position in the institutions they supposedly represented. The end result is going to be an overhaul of banking like we have not seen before perhaps in all of U.S. history.

The fact remains that the assets on the balance sheets of these banks are (a) overstated by assets that are either non existent or overvalued and (b) understated by the amount of money they parked off-shore in “off balance sheet transactions.”

In the end, which I predict could still be five years away or more, the large banks will have disappeared and the banking industry will return to the usual marketplace of large, medium and small banks, each easily subject to regulation and audits.

How the staggering toll exacted from the middle class will be handled is another story. Nobody in power wants to give the ordinary guy money even if he was defrauded. But unless they give restitution to the pension funds and homeowners, the economy will continue to drag and lag behind where it should be.

Wells Fargo Wachovia Unit Faces Probe Over Mortgage Practices

Reuters

Nov 6 (Reuters) – The government’s investigation of mortgage-related practices at Wells Fargo & Co includes the making and packaging of home loans by its Wachovia unit, the bank said in a filing Tuesday.

The No. 4 U.S. bank by assets disclosed in February that it may face federal enforcement action related to mortgage-backed securities deals leading to the financial crisis.

In Tuesday’s quarterly securities filing, Wells Fargo reiterated that it’s being investigated for whether it properly disclosed in offering documents the risks associated with its mortgage-backed securities.

The bank also said the government is investigating whether Wells Fargo complied with applicable laws, regulations and documentation requirements relating to mortgage originations and securitizations, including those at Wachovia.

San Francisco-based Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia at the peak of the financial crisis in 2008 as losses in the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank’s mortgage portfolio ballooned.

Mortgages packaged into securities for investors during the housing boom still haunt big banks years later. Banks have been accused of failing to ensure the quality of the loans and for misrepresenting their risk to investors.

In January, the Obama administration set up a special task force to investigate practices related to mortgage-backed securities at banks.

In the group’s first action, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman last month filed a civil suit against JPMorgan Chase & Co for alleged fraud at Bear Stearns, which JPMorgan bought at the government’s request in 2008.

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 22 Comments »

Florida Wrongful Foreclosure Victims Get $2k, Banks get $2,000k

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Neil Garfield

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Editor’s Note: For those who have given, up, moved on and don’t want to fight about it, the $2,000 check they are about to receive is like found money. But it is a surrender to greed, bullying and criminal behavior. The banks are giving the paltry sum of $2,000 in exchange for an average loan of $200,000 which they neither funded nor purchased, but which they sold multiple times, 1000 cents on the dollar.

As I understand it, you can take the $2,000 and also sue for wrongful foreclosure, but you can be sure that despite that, most people will not sue and those who do are going to be met with the argument that we already settled that.

For those interested in getting their check, read the article below or go to the Sun Sentinel or WPTV.com. You’ll get the information you need.

From WPTV.Com by Donna Gehrke-White, Sun Sentinel

Some 167,398 Floridians who lost homes to foreclosure may each get about $2,000 as part of the nation’s largest consumer financial protection settlement.

The checks will be sent out in early 2013, with more than a third going to people who lost homes in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, estimated Jack McCabe, a housing analyst based in Deerfield Beach.

People need to send in forms to receive the money by Jan. 18. How much people will receive depends on how many borrowers participate.

Already, Minneapolis-based Rust Consulting has “sent out notification postcards to eligible borrowers nationwide,” said John Lucas, a spokesman for the Florida Attorney General’s Office that is helping administer the historic federal, 49-state settlement.

“A low percentage of those postcards were returned, and Rust is conducting further research to locate those borrowers,” Lucas added in an e-mail. People can call toll-free 866-430-8358 to see if they qualify to be part of the settlement.

A former Pompano Beach homeowner who would only give his first name, Mike, said he called and found that he was on the list to get a check. He said he hired too late an attorney to fight his foreclosure. “I was in denial,” he said. “Divorce, job and house — I lost all three.”

In all, about $1.5 billion will be given nationwide to people who lost homes to foreclosure, with Floridians getting about $334 million.

The agreement covers borrowers who lost their homes to foreclosure from 2008 to 2011 and whose mortgage were serviced by Ally/GMAC, Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

The five lenders agreed to a massive $25 billion national settlement earlier this year. By August more than 23,000 struggling Floridians had received $1.7 billion in mortgage relief, including principal forgiveness, loan modifications and the suspension of mortgage payments until a later date, according to an interim report by the independent National Mortgage Settlement Administrator. Floridians will ultimately receive about $8 billion in relief.

Part of that includes money to owners who already have lost homes to foreclosure, including those Floridians served fraudulent “robo-signing” foreclosure notices by the five lenders. State and federal investigations found that the banks had routinely signed foreclosure-related documents outside the presence of a notary public and without really knowing whether the facts they contained were correct.

Roy Oppenheim, a foreclosure defense lawyer in Weston, said the projected $2,000 settlement to each foreclosed homeowner doesn’t go far enough in helping those South Floridians who were tossed out of their homes with such fraudulent paperwork.

“They should have been given more money,” Oppenheim said. “Those were criminal acts.”

But the settlement makes no distinction and gives the same amount, regardless of the circumstances of how people were foreclosed on, Oppenheim said.

Other foreclosure victims have been given much more money, he added. Another unrelated foreclosure settlement, for example, gave $25,000 to each soldier who was foreclosed on while fighting overseas, Oppenheim said.

Real estate analyst Jack McCabe agreed that the estimated $2,000 settlement doesn’t fully resolve the pain of foreclosure. “It’s like pocket change,” he said. Some homeowners, for example, lost tens of thousands of dollars in home equity when they were foreclosed on, McCabe said.

Still, it’s some cash: Most Floridians who lost homes to foreclosure won’t get anything, McCabe added. About 400,000 Floridians were foreclosed on between 2008 and 2011 but the settlement affects only 167,398 of them, he said. About 233,000 others had lenders who aren’t part of the agreement.

In addition, there are now about 339,000 more Floridians fighting foreclosure in court. More than a third — or 38 percent— live in Broward, Palm Beach or Miami-Dade counties, McCabe estimated.

In addition another 530,000 Floridians are more than 90 days late in paying their mortgage and face losing their home, he said.

“We’ve still got a full ways to go before we resolve this foreclosure crisis — another two to three years,” McCabe said.

—————————–

If you believe that you are eligible for relief and have not received a Claim Form, please contact the National Mortgage Settlement Administrator at 1-866-430-8358, Monday through Friday 7 a.m. – 7 p.m. Central Time

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

Dimon Threatens Obama: Investigate and Lose Settlement

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Neil Garfield

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Editor’s Comment: If there was any doubt in your mind about who thinks they run the government, it was dispelled yesterday when Reuters reported that Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase warned Obama that if the new investigation team actually does anything, there won’t be any settlement.

The sheer arrogance of a possible criminal demanding that the government stop investigating him or else the too big too fail bank won’t participate in settlement talks is unfathomable. It demands a response from Obama and it demands a re-thinking at the White House about its relationships with the big banks.

The real investigations are just getting started, with considerable support from already published instances of robo-signing, surrogate signing, forgery, fabrication and fraud in the foreclosure process.

Dimon reacted because of one major risk: the entire securitization scheme will be revealed as a scam from beginning to end. This would mean that the banks would have enormous liability to virtually all MBS investors, enormous tax liability for the REMICs and potentially to the investors, and enormous liability to homeowners who were duped into thinking that they had been through conventional loan underwriting when in fact it was jsut a marketing scheme to justify the movement of money.

As stated on these pages before, the result will be

  • (1) that investors, as creditors in these transactions are owed 100 cents on the dollar not by the homeowners, but by the Banks, who took investor money and either didn’t invest it all in loans, or invested in loans that they knew ( and were betting on) would fail
  • (2) that potentially trillions of dollars in unreported income went untaxed amounting more than any bailout
  • (3) that the mortgage documentation was so defective as to defy reformation or correction, leaving the loans unsecured and possibly non-existent and
  • (4) that the homeowners who have been foreclosed and dispossessed still own their properties with an unclear debt or obligation that is unsecured.

Dimon is trying to block reality from entering into the picture. Selling the loans multiple times through exotic instruments that looked like hedge products has its consequences. It leaves the creditor or its agents filled with money obtained through multiple payments on the same debt. All this seems counter-intuitive, I know. And it sure puts a crimp on the foreclosure plan that takes homes to satisfy a debt that has already been satisfied multiple times.

Beyond that, it provides a blueprint for correcting the corruption of the title registries across the country. Once the loans are shown to be defective beyond recognition, and once securitization is shown to be a word and a plan that was never actually executed, the whole thing boils down to one simple fact: there were loans but there were no mortgages. Papers was signed that meant nothing, disclosed nothing and violated every industry practice in place for hundreds of years.

There is no greater fiscal stimulus to the economy than returning ill-gotten gains to the investors and homeowners who were victims of this scheme. It will save pensions and allow people to recover the wealth that was siphoned out of the economy instead of the job Wall Street was meant to fulfill — pumping liquidity into the economy for expansion, innovation and prosperity. The answer is right there in front of us. The Banks have attempted to place false ideology in front of the requirements of law. The only question is whether the government will let that happen.

See Full Story on Reuters

JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said President Barack Obama’s decision to expand investigations into home lending and sales of mortgage securities could stop settlement talks with the states over foreclosure practices.

“It has a pretty good chance of derailing it,” Dimon said in a televised interview with CNBC from Davos, Switzerland on Thursday.

Obama, in his State of the Union address Tuesday, said he has asked his attorney general to create a special unit of prosecutors to expand investigations into home lending and packaging of mortgage-backed securities. It is not clear how the new unit will be different from earlier investigations.

JPMorgan is the largest U.S. bank and one of the larger servicers of mortgage loans. JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo & Co, Citigroup and Ally Financial Inc have been in talks with state attorneys general for months about settling allegations of foreclosure abuses.

The banks and states have been discussing a plan that would have the banks pay $25 billion to homeowners through reductions in principal on mortgage loans.

“I think it would be better for America if that settlement took place,” Dimon said. “If this thing derails that, so be it.”

(Reporting by David Henry; editing by John Wallace)

 

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 96 Comments »

JPMorgan Chase & Co. Sued by John Hancock For MBS Fraud

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Neil Garfield

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Editor’s Comment: If the financial institutions were lying to each other, committing civil and criminal fraud, how much of a stretch is it to think that they are lying to the Courts, lying to homeowners, and that they lied to homeowners who bought bogus loan products just like they lied to John Hancock who insured the bogus mortgage bonds based upon lies to the fund managers (investors) who served as the real lenders?

Why would ANYONE presume that the mortgages are valid liens, or that anyone other than the defrauded investors is entitled to any money from the borrowers, from the bailout, from insurance contracts, from CDS, and other credit “enhancements” all procured by fraud?

See Full Article on Bloomberg

JPMorgan Chase & Co. was sued by Manulife Financial Corp.’s John Hancock Life Insurance unit, which accused the bank of fraud in connection with the sale of residential mortgage-backed securities.

The lawsuit, filed today in New York state Supreme Court in Manhattan, seeks unspecified damages for losses of market value and principal and interest payments, as well as rescission and recovery of payment for the investments.

John Hancock bought the securities “in reliance on the false and misleading” statements made by the defendants, which include Bear Stearns & Co. and Washington Mutual Inc. (WAMUQ), both of which were acquired by JPMorgan, lawyers for the Boston-based insurer said in the lawsuit.

“Based on these material misrepresentations and omissions, plaintiffs purchased securities that were far riskier than had been represented, backed by mortgage loans worth significantly less than had been represented, and that had been made to borrowers who were much less creditworthy than had been represented,” attorneys for John Hancock said in the lawsuit.

Pools of home loans securitized into bonds were a central part of the housing bubble that helped send the U.S. into the biggest recession since the 1930s. The housing market collapsed, and the crisis swept up lenders and investment banks as the market for the securities evaporated.

Jennifer Zuccarelli, a spokeswoman for JPMorgan, didn’t immediately return a telephone message left at her office seeking comment on the lawsuit.

The case is John Hancock Life Insurance Co. v. JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), 650195/2012, New York state Supreme Court (Manhattan).

To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Dolmetsch in New York at cdolmetsch@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Hytha at mhytha@bloomberg.net

 

Filed under: bubble, CDO, CORRUPTION, currency, Eviction, foreclosure, GTC | Honor, Investor, Mortgage, securities fraud | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 45 Comments »

Here is How JPMorgan Posts $19B Annual Profit Despite Housing Hangover

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Neil Garfield

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EDITOR’S ANALYSIS: You might ask how any bank could post such huge profits while the economy is in the toilet, Europe is falling apart and Asia is having problems. The answer lies — yes here it is again — in the level 2 yield spread premium they stole from investors. The way I add it up, the Banks collectively stole nearly 3 Trillion dollars from the investors before they even started funding loans out of investor money. According to some documentation that I received anonymously and a some documentation I received accidentally, that money was whisked off-shore through Bermuda, who asserted tax jurisdiction over the money and then waived the tax.
  1. The yield spread premium was achieved through the use of smoke and mirrors, which is to say business as usual on Wall Street. By making loans at higher interest interest rates or higher stated interest rates on stated asset and subprime loans, Wall Street reduced the amount that was needed to fund loans — and pocketed the difference without telling investors or disclosing to borrowers as required by the Federal Truth in Lending Act. On the one hand they say they are lenders so they can foreclose, and on the other they say they are not subject to the TILA disclosure requirements.
  2. The spread was enormous — each one as much as 100 times the yield spread premium that brokers were paid for steering hapless borrowers into more expensive loans.
  3. In a frequent example, the investor was expecting a return of 5% based upon loans of only the highest quality which of course would carry an interest rate that was the lowest the market had to offer — at around 5% average. If that had actually been done, Wall Street wouldn’t have been interested because the fees were too low. Instead, the Wall Street Banks sought out loans that carried a stated interest rate of 10% — obviously to borrowers who were either less credit worthy than the borrowers that the investors were expecting or borrowers who were convinced they were less credit  worthy, or they were convinced that the loan in front of them was a better deal even though they qualified for a lower interest rate.
  4. By doubling the interest rate the banks halved the principal funded by investors, pocketing the rest which they booked, for the most part as trading profits. They simply sold the 10% loan for the value of the 5% loan and doubled their money without using any of their own money to begin with.They kept the profit and didn’t report it while putting the investors at far greater risk than they were led to expect.
  5. So now, when the recession is gripping the world, Banks are reporting higher profits because they are able to feed the off-shore off-balance sheet transactions back in as needed to maintain the appearance of profitability. It is a living lie.
  6. Besides the obvious fact that these were ill-gotten gains from the past and not profits from current operations and the banks’ auditors will pay for this one day when shareholders wake up, there is a much more insidious and dangerous aspect to this shell game. If the law is applied as many scholars and writers, including myself, believe it should be, there is no doubt that the result would be a reversal of most foreclosures and an obligation that is unsecured or secured with some modified deal or settlement.
  7. It is highly likely that the the most dreaded result would occur — homeowners would actually pay the full balance of their debts after deductions for payments by third parties and set-off for TILA and other lending violations.
  8. This would result in a requirement of full accounting to the investors who would quickly find out that although the loans were paid in full, the amount they advanced was still not covered — because of the theft by the banks and reported as trading profits. It would also lead those who advanced money on the premise that the pools were insolvent to demand their money back because the loss they were covering in the insurance contract or contract for credit default swap never materialized — except for the intentional act of theft by the Banks.
  9. The resulting effect would be unraveling and reversing a lot of the profit made by selling the loans multiple times through exotic instruments that obscured the fact that they were in essence just selling the same loan over and over again — as much as 40 times the original loan. The consequences are by no means assured, but it seems logical that the Tier 2 YSP would be required to be disgorged. And then, it is possible they would be required to disgorge the money they received from Federal Bailout, insurance, credit default swaps and other derivatives and credit enhancement tools.
  10. Which means that loan you had that was $200,000 in principal is a liability to the Wall Street banks IF YOU PAY IT OFF — and that liability could be in excess of $8 million. When you reverse engineer the Wall Street process that led us into the mortgage meltdown and recession you see several things — false securitization, a fake default rate, fake losses, fraudulent foreclosures and a recession that only happened because the banks sucked the money out of the system. Just follow the money — everyone including government is a loser except the banks. The conclusion is inescapable.
By: Carrie Bay 01/13/2012
JPMorgan Chase kicked off the earnings reporting season for major U.S. lenders on Friday with its announcement that the company earned a record profit of $19 billion for the 2011 fiscal year. That compares with $17.4 billion in net income for the prior year. Earnings per share were $4.48 for 2011.
The company reported net income of $3.7 billion for the fourth quarter of 2011, compared with $4.8 billion for the fourth quarter of 2010.
Although the numbers paint a picture of a company in full recovery mode from the financial crisis and recession, JPMorgan’s latest results missed analysts’ expectations as
the company continues to struggle with legacy issues stemming from the housing downturn.
Mortgage net charge-offs and delinquencies modestly improved over the final quarter of 2011, but both remained at elevated levels, the New York-based lender noted in its earnings report.
JPMorgan’s total nonperforming assets declined by 33 percent compared to a year earlier, but legal wranglings involving mortgages and investors’ repurchase demands cut heavily into the company’s profits.
The company doled out more than $3 billion in 2011 to cover legal proceedings related to its mortgage business. That tally marks a decline from the $5.7 billion that was laid down in 2010 but still represents a hefty sum of what could have gone to boosting the bottom line.
CEO Jamie Dimon says the company set aside $528 million in the final quarter of last year alone to address mortgage-related legal issues.
The handling of foreclosures and defaulted mortgages also carried a steep price tag. In the fourth quarter, JPMorgan’s cost related to this part of the business added up to $925 million.
“There’s still a huge drag [from housing issues],” CEO Jamie Dimon told investors. “You’re talking about several billion dollars a year in mortgage [operations] alone.”
©2012 DS News. All Rights Reserved.
Charles
Charles Wayne Cox – Oregon State Director for the National Homeowners Cooperative
Email: mailto:Charles@BayLiving.com
Websites: http://www.NHCwest.com; www.BayLiving.com; and www.ForensicLoanAnalyst.com
1969 Camellia Ave.
Medford, OR 97504-5403
(541) 727-2240 direct
(541) 610-1931 eFax

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INVESTOR FORCES US BANK TO SUE JPMORGAN CHASE

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Neil Garfield

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EDITOR’S NOTE: If you read between the lines here, you’ll see what really is happening. US Bank doesn’t want to be suing the investment banks over what are clearly fraudulent securities based upon derivatives of bogus mortgage bonds. It doesn’t want that because it is going around the country advertising itself as the trustee for the securities, and sometimes for the securities’ holders. When they say they are the trustee for the securities they are (a) lying and (b) creating an entity that does not exist — a fictitious entity since certificates are not legal persons and thus cannot legally act in court or otherwise.

The other reason US Bank doesn’t want to be suing JPMorgan (besides the obvious incestuous relationship between the two banks) is that it opens the door to proof problems at ground zero in foreclosure actions.

Questions abound. Do the investors know that US Bank is pursuing foreclosures instead of meaningful settlements that would mitigate the losses? If US Bank receives money from JPM, how will that be allocated — specifically how much will the obligation on each loan be reduced by payment from JPM?

Will the misrepresentations of JPM spill over into allegations that mirror the US Bank case when US Bank tries to foreclose on a home? As the finger pointing jubilee gets into full gear, will Judges start realizing that there is and was something terribly wrong and misleading about the entire process — including the origination of the loans, the transfer of loans, the perfection of liens, the amount demanded as due from the borrower, and the list goes on.

JPMorgan sued for $95 million over mortgage securities

SEE ENTIRE ARTICLE ON REUTERS

(Reuters) – JPMorgan Chase & Co has been sued for $95 million by the trustee for securities marketed in 2005 by the former Bear Stearns Cos over alleged misrepresentations regarding the underlying mortgage loans.

US Bank NA wants to force JPMorgan to buy back the mortgage loans because of alleged breaches of representations and warranties regarding the Bear Stearns Asset Backed Securities Trust 2005-4, for which it serves as trustee.

It also accused the largest U.S. bank by assets of refusing to provide the underlying loan files, as the trust documents require, so it can investigate the extent of the alleged breaches.

The unit of US Bancorp said it made its request at the direction of a majority certificate holder in the trust. US Bank also sued Bear Stearns and its former EMC Mortgage Corp unit. JPMorgan bought Bear Stearns in 2008.

The lawsuit was filed on Friday in the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, and publicly docketed on Tuesday.

It is one of many lawsuits seeking to hold banks responsible for investor losses over mortgages that may have been toxic, defective or improperly underwritten.

JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon last month told investors that the bank has been sued over $54.9 billion of private-label securitizations, excluding the former Washington Mutual Inc, and expects that number to rise.

The case is Bear Stearns Asset Backed Securities Trust 2005-4 v. EMC Mortgage Corp et al, New York State Supreme Court, New York County, No. 650003/2012.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Additional reporting by David Henry; editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

 

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Minnesota AG Backs NY AG: No Amnesty For Banks

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Neil Garfield

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POLITICIANS SMELL BLOOD: RUN AGAINST THE BANKS

“Every single American has paid a very heavy price for the behavior of the financial industry. Ordinary people have lost homes, jobs, income, and financial security because of the actions of this industry,” Swanson said in a statement emailed to The Huffington Post by a spokesman. “I welcome and embrace all efforts to investigate the banks and their executives and to hold them accountable for unlawful activity.”

Minnesota Attorney General Backs New York’s Eric Schneiderman In National Foreclosure Settlement Talks

Minnesota Lori Swanson

First Posted: 9/13/11 12:24 PM ET Updated: 9/13/11 01:40 PM

NEW YORK — As government officials work to settle claims that the nation’s biggest banks illegally foreclosed on American homeowners, Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson has joined a group of law enforcers pushing for a narrow deal that would leave banks exposed to potential legal action in the future.

In a letter obtained by The Huffington Post, Swanson said any settlement with the group of banks over mortgage practices should exclude a release from claims over the creation of mortgage-linked securities. Swanson’s support for a narrow settlement unites her with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and attorneys general from three other states, who have said the banks’ alleged wrongdoing hasn’t been investigated thoroughly enough to merit a broader release from legal liability.

“[T]he banks should not be released from liability for conduct that has not been investigated and is not appropriately remedied in any settlement,” she said in a Friday letter addressed to Schneiderman, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller and Associate United States Attorney General Thomas Perrelli. “For example, a settlement that focuses on mortgage servicing standards should not release the banks or their officers from liability for securities claims or conduct arising out of the securitization of mortgages.”

“[A]ny settlement between government regulators and the mortgage industry should have ‘teeth’ — holding the banks accountable for their wrongful conduct, enjoining future unlawful activity, and helping injured homeowners,” she continued.

The federal government, along with attorneys general from all 50 states, launched an investigation into big banks’ mortgage and foreclosure practices after it emerged last fall that mortgage companies employed so-called “robo-signers,” who signed thousands of foreclosure documents without reading them. Banks temporarily halted foreclosures last October, saying they would review documents for errors.

Settlement talks, which began in the spring, seemed to be moving toward a conclusion during the summer months, even though government officials had initiated only a limited investigation into the banks’ alleged wrongdoing, The Huffington Post reported in July. Elizabeth Warren, a staunch consumer advocate and recently a senior Obama Administration adviser, told a congressional panel that claims of illegal foreclosures may not have been fully investigated.

The banks, which include Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Ally Financial, have pushed for a speedy resolution, as uncertainty over a legal penalty that could reach $20 billion has contributed to persistent slumps in their stock. “When we get that call we’ll be on an airplane, we’ll be down there, we’ll be signing up,” JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon said during a conference call in July.

Schneiderman, who has firmly supported a narrow deal, was last month kicked off the committee leading the 50-state talks at the behest of Iowa’s Miller, who is leading the state group, The Huffington Post reported. That news broke a day after the New York Times editorial board voiced support for New York’s attorney general, saying Schneiderman “should stand his ground in not supporting the deal.”

The skirmish among government officials highlights divisions that have emerged, as federal officials and some state attorneys general advocate for a quick resolution, while others are urging the parties not to settle unless there has been a more thorough investigation. Some attorneys general, including Schneiderman, are also pursuing their own investigations.

Law enforcers recently proposed a deal that would effectively release banks from legal liability for securitization practices, the Financial Times reported earlier this month. The banks, which want the broadest possible immunity, called the latest proposal a “non-starter,” according to the FT.

In addition to Swanson and Schneiderman, the attorneys general from Delaware, Massachusetts and Nevada have also raised concerns about a broad release of legal liability for the banks.

“We have received Attorney General Swanson’s letter and agree that any agreement must not prevent attorneys general investigating the mortgage crisis from following the facts wherever they lead,” Danny Kanner, spokesman for the New York attorney general, said in an emailed statement.

“Every single American has paid a very heavy price for the behavior of the financial industry. Ordinary people have lost homes, jobs, income, and financial security because of the actions of this industry,” Swanson said in a statement emailed to The Huffington Post by a spokesman. “I welcome and embrace all efforts to investigate the banks and their executives and to hold them accountable for unlawful activity.”

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MERS: A FAILED ATTEMPT AT BYPASSING STATE AND FEDERAL AUTHORITY

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Neil Garfield

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Fannie-Freddie’s Hypocritical Suit Against Banks Making Loans that GSEs Helped Create

Fannie-Freddie’s Hypocritical Suit Against Banks Making Loans that GSEs Helped Create

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Practically everything that the government is doing with respect to the economy and the housing market in particular is hypocritical. If we look to the result to determine the intent of the government you can see why nothing is being done to improve DOMESTIC market conditions. By removing the American consumer from the marketplace (through elimination of available funds in equity, savings or credit) the economic prospects for virtually every marketplace in the world is correspondingly diminished. The downward pressure on economic performance worldwide creates a panic regarding debt and currency. By default (and partially because of the military strength of the United States) people are ironically finding the dollar to be the safest haven during a bad storm.

 The result is that the federal government is able to borrow funds at interest rates that are so low that the investor is guaranteed to lose money after adjusting for inflation. The climate that has been created is one in which investors are far more concerned with preservation of capital than return on capital. In a nutshell, this is why the credit markets are virtually frozen with respect to the average potential consumer, the average small business owner, and the average entrepreneur or innovator who would otherwise start a new business and fuel rising employment.

 While it is true that the lawsuits by Fannie and Freddie are appropriate regardless of their past hypocritical behavior, they are really only rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Ultimately there must be a resolution to our current economic problems that is based in reality rather than the power to manipulate events. The scenario we all seek  would cleanup the rising title crisis, end the foreclosure crisis, and restore a true marketplace in the purchase and sale of real estate. We have all known for decades that the housing market drives the economy.

 There is obviously very little confidence that the government and market makers in the United States are going to seek any resolution based in reality. Therefore while investors are parking their money in dollars they are also driving up the price of gold and finding other innovative ways to preserve their wealth. As these innovations evolve it is almost certain that an alternative to the United States dollar will emerge. The driving force behind this innovation is the stagnation of the credit markets and the world marketplace. My opinion is that the United States is pursuing a policy that virtually guarantees the creation of a new world reserve currency.

 The creation of MERS was a private attempt to substitute private business plans for public laws. It didn’t work. The lawsuits by the government-sponsored entities together with lawsuits from investors who were duped into being lenders and homeowners who were duped into being borrowers in a rigged market are only going to result in money judgments and money settlements. With a nominal value of credit derivatives at over $600 trillion and the actual money supply at under $50 trillion there is literally not enough money in the world to fix this problem. The problem can only be fixed by recognizing and applying existing law to existing transactions.

 This means that MERS, already discredited, must be treated as a nonexistent entity in the world of real estate transactions. Nobody wants to do that because the failure to disclose an actual creditor on the face of a purported lean or encumbrance on land is a fatal defect in perfecting the lien. This is true throughout the country and it is obvious to anyone who has studied real property transactions and mortgages. If you don’t have the name and address of the creditor from whom you can obtain a satisfaction of mortgage, then you don’t have a mortgage that attaches to the land as a lien. It is this realization that is forming a number of lawsuits from the investors who advanced money for mortgage bonds. Those advances were the funds that were used to finance pornographic Wall Street profits with the balance used to fund absurd mortgage products.

 This is basic property law and public policy. There can be no confidence or consistency in the marketplace without a buyer or a lender knowing that they can rely upon the information contained in a government title Registry at the county recording office. Any other method requires them to take the word of someone without the authority of the government. This is a fact and it is the law. But the banks are successfully using politics to sidestep the basic essential elements of law. Under their theory the fact that the mortgage lien was never perfected would be ignored so that bank and non-bank institutions could become the largest landholders in the country without ever having spent a dime on loaning any money or purchasing the receivables. Politics is trumping law.

 The narrative and the debate are being absolutely controlled by Wall Street interests. We say we don’t like what the banks did and many say they don’t like banks at all. But it is also true that the same people who say they don’t like banks are willing to let the banks keep their windfall and make even more money at the expense of the taxpayer, the consumer and the homeowner. There are trillions of dollars available for investment in business expansion, government projects, and good old American innovation to drive a healthy economy. It won’t happen until we begin to drive the debate ourselves and force government and banking to conform to rules and laws that have been in existence for centuries.

from STOP FORECLOSURE FRAUD…………….

Lets NOT forget both Fannie and Freddie, like most of the named banks they are suing, each are shareholders of MERS.

Again, who gave the green light to eliminate the need for assignments and to realize the greatest savings, lenders should close loans using standard security instruments containing “MOM” language back in April 26, 1999?

This was approved by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which named MERS as Original Mortgagee (MOM)!

Open Market-

“U.S. is set to sue dozen big banks over mortgages,” reads the front-page headline in today’s New York Times. The “deck” below the headline explains that that the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is “seen as arguing that lenders lacked due diligence” in the loans they made.

A more apt description would probably be that Fannie and Freddie are suing the banks for selling them the very loans the GSEs helped designed and that government mandates encourage — and are still encouraging them to make. These conflicted actions are just one more of the government’s contributions to the uncertainty that is helping to keep unemployment at 9 percent.

Strangely the author of the Times piece, Nelson Schwartz, ignores the findings of a recent blockbuster

…

[OPEN MARKET]

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BANKS DEFRAUDING TAXPAYERS FACE FATE OF AL CAPONE

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Neil Garfield

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EDITOR’S NOTE:  Somehow this particular article escaped me when it was published by Huffington Post. Like all the other allegations against the participants in the mortgage securitization hoax, the underlying theme is that the major banks simply lied about the ownership, value and nature of the mortgage assets. In this case the government paid them based upon their naked representation that the mortgage liens had been perfected and properly transferred.

 So far the banks have been successful, for the most part, in convincing the public and the courts that the mortgage liens have been perfected and properly transferred in all cases where claims of “ownership” were based upon securitization of debt. But in every case where professionals have been employed and have taken the time to carefully examine both the money trail and the document trail they have reached the conclusion that the documents and the handling of the money has been at best fatally defective and at worst fraudulent, forged,  and fabricated.

 The victims of this hoax include every taxpayer, consumer, homeowner and business in the entire country. As the lawsuits multiply and as the attorney general of each state comes to realize the political risk of siding with the banks, it will become obvious that we are all affected regardless of whether we are directly involved in the foreclosure process or merely suffering the results of collateral damage.

 The debates regarding the debt ceiling, spending and the tax code are mere distractions from the enforcement of existing tax liability of the participants in the massive securitization hoax. As taxpayers we have given the banks considerable resources to kick the can down the road. But the ultimate result cannot be disputed. Trillions of dollars are owed to the federal government, state governments and local governments on transactions that were either not reported at all or were reported with the intent to deceive those governments and deprive them of revenue.

The missing revenue together with the fraudulent receipt of payments from taxpayers for nonexistent or fraudulently represented mortgages and mortgage assets constitute all of the “deficit” that has been reported for all the governmental  entities that supposedly are in distress, bankrupt were subject to downgrade in their credit ratings.

 Simply stated, the deficit money is sitting on Wall Street or offshore under the control of those who control the Wall Street entities that perpetrated the grand securitization hoax. The same is true for individual consumers and homeowners. The scope of the securitization hoax included but was not limited to home loans, credit cards, student loans, auto loans and virtually every other kind of debt imaginable. Lately we have been receiving reports that the securitization hoax is expanding its scope to include life insurance. By inducing those who would otherwise not purchased life insurance (perhaps because they could not afford it) or who would purchase a contract from a life insurance carrier that was not involved in securitization, Wall Street is creating a vehicle which for the first time institutionalizes the motivation to deprive people of their lives.

 There are many permutations of the securitization hoax. The bottom line is that the vendor of the financial products sold to the consumer is not taking any risk, but is being paid, like an actor. In this way Wall Street is essentially the primary actor in the sale of financial products, like all mortgages or insurance, without being regulated or licensed by the appropriate federal or state agency.

The actors (pretender lenders) are either lending their licenses contrary to law or pretending to be licensed and getting away with it because of the apparent complexity of securitization. There is no need for complex analysis. Either they are a lender or they are not. Either they are a mortgage broker or they are not. Either they are an insurance broker or they are not. And if they acted as a lender when in fact their function was as a mortgage broker they have violated the law. And if they acted as a mortgage originator when in fact their function was a mortgage broker, they have violated the law. The administrative agencies regulating the various professions involved in real estate transactions have lots of work to do, lots of discipline to mete out, lots of fines to collect and lots of restitution to order.

 There are hundreds of millions of transactions in which worthless paper was involved which contained claims to obligations, notes and mortgages (which are interest in real property). The fact that these were fraudulent transactions does not take away from the fact that a profit was made, that documents should have been recorded, and that taxes and fees were due. The only question left is whether there are enough people left in government who are willing to use the tools available to them to correct the mess created by the securitization hoax.

Al Capone, the famed mobster, got away with almost everything including murder — until  he was taken down for tax fraud. It doesn’t matter how his reign of terror was ended. What matters is that it did end. And if government had followed through there would not have been anything to replace him. That is the challenge facing today’s government. And more importantly, it is the challenge to our Republic, where inch by inch, personal liberties have been taken away that are still guaranteed by our most basic law — the American Constitution.

___________________________________________________________________

“The audits conclude that the banks effectively cheated taxpayers by presenting the Federal Housing Administration with false claims: They filed for federal reimbursement on foreclosed homes that sold for less than the outstanding loan balance using defective and faulty documents.”

“Those violations are likely only a small fraction of the number committed by home loan companies, experts say, citing the small sample examined by regulators.”

Shahien Nasiripour

Shahien Nasiripour shahien@huffingtonpost.com

Confidential Federal Audits Accuse Five Biggest Mortgage Firms Of Defrauding Taxpayers [EXCLUSIVE]

Foreclosure Fraud

WASHINGTON — A set of confidential federal audits accuse the nation’s five largest mortgage companies of defrauding taxpayers in their handling of foreclosures on homes purchased with government-backed loans, four officials briefed on the findings told The Huffington Post.

The five separate investigations were conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general and examined Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial, the sources said.

The audits accuse the five major lenders of violating the False Claims Act, a Civil War-era law crafted as a weapon against firms that swindle the government. The audits were completed between February and March, the sources said. The internal watchdog office at HUD referred its findings to the Department of Justice, which must now decide whether to file charges.

The federal audits mark the latest fallout from the national foreclosure crisis that followed the end of a long-running housing bubble. Amid reports last year that many large lenders improperly accelerated foreclosure proceedings by failing to amass required paperwork, the federal agencies launched their own probes.

The resulting reports read like veritable indictments of major lenders, the sources said. State officials are now wielding the documents as leverage in their ongoing talks with mortgage companies aimed at forcing the firms to agree to pay fines to resolve allegations of routine violations in their handling of foreclosures.

The audits conclude that the banks effectively cheated taxpayers by presenting the Federal Housing Administration with false claims: They filed for federal reimbursement on foreclosed homes that sold for less than the outstanding loan balance using defective and faulty documents.

Two of the firms, including Bank of America, refused to cooperate with the investigations, according to the sources. The audit on Bank of America finds that the company — the nation’s largest handler of home loans — failed to correct faulty foreclosure practices even after imposing a moratorium that lifted last October. Back then, the bank said it was resuming foreclosures, having satisfied itself that prior problems had been solved.

According to the sources, the Wells Fargo investigation concludes that senior managers at the firm, the fourth-largest American bank by assets, broke civil laws. HUD’s inspector general interviewed a pair of South Carolina public notaries who improperly signed off on foreclosure filings for Wells, the sources said.

The investigations dovetail with separate probes by state and federal agencies, who also have examined foreclosure filings and flawed mortgage practices amid widespread reports that major mortgage firms improperly initiated foreclosure proceedings on an unknown number of American homeowners.

The FHA, whose defaulted loans the inspector general probed, last May began scrutinizing whether mortgage firms properly treated troubled borrowers who fell behind on payments or whose homes were seized on loans insured by the agency.

A unit of the Justice Department is examining faulty court filings in bankruptcy proceedings. Several states, including Illinois, are combing through foreclosure filings to gauge the extent of so-called “robo-signing” and other defective practices, including illegal home repossessions.

Representatives of HUD and its inspector general declined to comment.

The internal audits have armed state officials with a powerful new weapon as they seek to extract what they describe as punitive fines from lawbreaking mortgage companies.

A coalition of attorneys general from all 50 states and state bank supervisors have joined HUD, the Treasury Department, the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission in talks with the five largest mortgage servicers to settle allegations of illegal foreclosures and other shoddy practices.

Such processes “have potentially infected millions of foreclosures,” Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chairman Sheila Bair told a Senate panel on Thursday.

The five giant mortgage servicers, which collectively handle about three of every five home loans, offered during a contentious round of negotiations last Tuesday to pay $5 billion to set up a fund to help distressed borrowers and settle the allegations.

That offer — also floated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in February — was deemed much too low by state and federal officials. Associate U.S. Attorney General Tom Perrelli, who has been leading the talks, last week threatened to show the banks the confidential audits so the firms knew the government side was not “playing around,” one official involved in the negotiations said. He ultimately did not follow through, persuaded that the reports ought to remain confidential, sources said. Through a spokeswoman, Perrelli declined to comment.

Most of the targeted banks have not seen the audits, a federal official said, though they are generally aware of the findings.

Some agencies involved in the talks are calling for the five banks to shell out as much as $30 billion, with even more costs to be incurred for improving their internal operations and modifying troubled borrowers’ home loans.

But even that number would fall short of legitimate compensation for the bank’s harmful practices, reckons the nascent federal Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. By taking shortcuts in processing troubled borrowers’ home loans, the nation’s five largest mortgage firms have directly saved themselves more than $20 billion since the housing crisis began in 2007, according to a confidential presentation prepared for state attorneys general by the agency and obtained by The Huffington Post in March. Those pushing for a larger package of fines argue that the foreclosure crisis has spawned broader — and more costly — social ills, from the dislocation of American families to the continued plunge in home prices, effectively wiping out household savings.

The Justice Department is now contemplating whether to use the HUD audits as a basis for civil and criminal enforcement actions, the sources said. The False Claims Act allows the government to recover damages worth three times the actual harm plus additional penalties.

Justice officials will soon meet with the largest servicers and walk them through the allegations and potential liability each of them face, the sources said.

Earlier this month, Justice cited findings from HUD investigations in a lawsuit it filed against Deutsche Bank AG, one of the world’s 10 biggest banks by assets, for at least $1 billion for defrauding taxpayers by “repeatedly” lying to FHA in securing taxpayer-backed insurance for thousands of shoddy mortgages.

In March, HUD’s inspector general found that more than 49 percent of loans underwritten by FHA-approved lenders in a sample did not conform to the agency’s requirements.

Last October, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan said his investigators found that numerous mortgage firms broke the agency’s rules when dealing with delinquent borrowers. He declined to be specific.

The agency’s review later expanded to flawed foreclosure practices. FHA, a unit of HUD, could still take administrative action against those firms for breaking FHA rules based on its own probe.

The confidential findings appear to bolster state and federal officials in their talks with the targeted banks. The knowledge that they may face False Claims Act suits, in addition to state actions based on a multitude of claims like fraud on local courts and consumer violations, will likely compel the banks to offer the government more money to resolve everything.

But even that may not be enough.

Attorneys general in numerous states, armed with what they portray as incontrovertible evidence of mass robo-signings from preliminary investigations, are probing mortgage practices more closely.

The state of Illinois has begun examining potentially-fraudulent court filings, looking at the role played by a unit of Lender Processing Services. Nevada and Arizona already launched lawsuits against Bank of America. California is keen on launching its own suits, people familiar with the matter say. Delaware sent Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc., which runs an electronic registry of mortgages, a subpoena demanding answers to 75 questions. And New York’s top law enforcer, Eric Schneiderman, wants to conduct a complete investigation into all facets of mortgage banking, from fraudulent lending to defective securitization practices to faulty foreclosure documents and illegal home seizures.

A review of about 2,800 loans that experienced foreclosure last year serviced by the nation’s 14 largest mortgage firms found that at least two of them illegally foreclosed on the homes of “almost 50” active-duty military service members, a violation of federal law, according to a report this month from the Government Accountability Office.

Those violations are likely only a small fraction of the number committed by home loan companies, experts say, citing the small sample examined by regulators.

In an April report on flawed mortgage servicing practices, federal bank supervisors said they “could not provide a reliable estimate of the number of foreclosures that should not have proceeded.”

The review of just 2,800 home loans in foreclosure compares with nearly 2.9 million homes that received a foreclosure filing last year, according to RealtyTrac, a California-based data provider.

“The extent of the loss cannot be determined until there is a comprehensive review of the loan files and documentation of the process dealing with problem loans,” Bair said last week, warning of damages that could take “years to materialize.”

Home prices have fallen over the past year, reversing gains made early in the economic recovery, according to data providers Zillow.com and CoreLogic. Sales of new homes remain depressed, according to the Commerce Department. More than a quarter of homeowners with a mortgage owe more on that debt than their home is worth, according to Zillow.com. And more than 2 million homes are in foreclosure, according to Lender Processing Services.

Rather than punishing banks for misdeeds, the administration is now focused on helping troubled borrowers in the hope that it will stanch the flood of foreclosures and increase consumer confidence, officials involved in the negotiations said.

Levying penalties can’t accomplish that goal, an official involved in the foreclosure probe talks argued last week.

For their part, however, state officials want to levy fines, according to a confidential term sheet reviewed last week by HuffPost. Each state would then use the money as it desires, be it for facilitating short sales, reducing mortgage principal, or using the funds to help defaulted borrowers move from their homes into rentals.

In a report last week, analysts at Moody’s Investors Service predicted that while the losses incurred by the banks will be “sizable,” the credit rating agency does “not expect them to meaningfully impact capital.”

*************************Shahien Nasiripour is a senior business reporter for The Huffington Post. You can send him an e-mail; bookmark his page; subscribe to his RSS feed; follow him on Twitter; friend him on Facebook; become a fan; and/or get e-mail alerts when he reports the latest news. He can be reached at 917-267-2335.

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Window Dressing: File a Lawsuit — Maybe It will Improve the View

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Neil Garfield

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EDITOR’S COMMENT: YAWN! The government keeps filing lawsuits that COULD be big and COULD cause make corrections in the marketplace to reflect reality. But then they go nowhere, with discovery stymied by the Banks and then a settlement on the table that sells out everyone except the half dozen big banks that we allow to control the market, courtesy of our taxpayer money and our refusal to apply the same rules to them we do to the 7,000 other community banks and credit unions who could do the same or better job at handling the country’s finance sector.

Don’t get fooled. When someone comes out and says that securitization was an illusion, a ruse to defraud as many people in world population as possible, TEN we will have addressed the problem. When that special someone is willing to consider the idea that the banks never actually lost money and never needed a bailout, but that the top management diverted pornographic profits to off-shore havens then we will be on track to recapture the nation’s wealth, which currently is held hostage by Wall Street banks and the great majority of those in government who depend upon the mega banks for their political campaign expenses.

In the meanwhile, the lawsuits should be watched because deep inside each suit are some additional allegations, indicating the results of administrative investigations that you can use. When we get serious, the lawsuits will come fast and furious and aggressively pursued. Until then, all thee actions amount to little more than window dressing.

U.S. Is Set to Sue a Dozen Big Banks Over Mortgages

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The federal agency that oversees the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is set to file suits against more than a dozen big banks, accusing them of misrepresenting the quality of mortgage securities they assembled and sold at the height of the housing bubble, and seeking billions of dollars in compensation.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency suits, which are expected to be filed in the coming days in federal court, are aimed at Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, among others, according to three individuals briefed on the matter.

The suits stem from subpoenas the finance agency issued to banks a year ago. If the case is not filed Friday, they said, it will come Tuesday, shortly before a deadline expires for the housing agency to file claims.

The suits will argue the banks, which assembled the mortgages and marketed them as securities to investors, failed to perform the due diligence required under securities law and missed evidence that borrowers’ incomes were inflated or falsified. When many borrowers were unable to pay their mortgages, the securities backed by the mortgages quickly lost value.

Fannie and Freddie lost more than $30 billion, in part as a result of the deals, losses that were borne mostly by taxpayers.

In July, the agency filed suit against UBS, another major mortgage securitizer, seeking to recover at least $900 million, and the individuals with knowledge of the case said the new litigation would be similar in scope.

Private holders of mortgage securities are already trying to force the big banks to buy back tens of billions in soured mortgage-backed bonds, but this federal effort is a new chapter in a huge legal fight that has alarmed investors in bank shares. In this case, rather than demanding that the banks buy back the original loans, the finance agency is seeking reimbursement for losses on the securities held by Fannie and Freddie.

The impending litigation underscores how almost exactly three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of a financial crisis caused in large part by subprime lending, the legal fallout is mounting.

Besides the angry investors, 50 state attorneys general are in the final stages of negotiating a settlement to address abuses by the largest mortgage servicers, including Bank of America, JPMorgan and Citigroup. The attorneys general, as well as federal officials, are pressing the banks to pay at least $20 billion in that case, with much of the money earmarked to reduce mortgages of homeowners facing foreclosure.

And last month, the insurance giant American International Group filed a $10 billion suit against Bank of America, accusing the bank and its Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch units of misrepresenting the quality of mortgages that backed the securities A.I.G. bought.

Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan all declined to comment. Frank Kelly, a spokesman for Deutsche Bank, said, “We can’t comment on a suit that we haven’t seen and hasn’t been filed yet.”

But privately, financial service industry executives argue that the losses on the mortgage-backed securities were caused by a broader downturn in the economy and the housing market, not by how the mortgages were originated or packaged into securities. In addition, they contend that investors like A.I.G. as well as Fannie and Freddie were sophisticated and knew the securities were not without risk.

Investors fear that if banks are forced to pay out billions of dollars for mortgages that later defaulted, it could sap earnings for years and contribute to further losses across the financial services industry, which has only recently regained its footing.

Bank officials also counter that further legal attacks on them will only delay the recovery in the housing market, which remains moribund, hurting the broader economy. Other experts warned that a series of adverse settlements costing the banks billions raises other risks, even if suits have legal merit.

The housing finance agency was created in 2008 and assigned to oversee the hemorrhaging government-backed mortgage companies, a process known as conservatorship.

“While I believe that F.H.F.A. is acting responsibly in its role as conservator, I am afraid that we risk pushing these guys off of a cliff and we’re going to have to bail out the banks again,” said Tim Rood, who worked at Fannie Mae until 2006 and is now a partner at the Collingwood Group, which advises banks and servicers on housing-related issues.

The suits are being filed now because regulators are concerned that it will be much harder to make claims after a three-year statute of limitations expires on Wednesday, the third anniversary of the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

While the banks put together tens of billions of dollars in mortgage securities backed by risky loans, the Federal Housing Finance Agency is not seeking the total amount in compensation because some of the mortgages are still good and the investments still carry some value. In the UBS suit, the agency said it owned $4.5 billion worth of mortgages, with losses totaling $900 million. Negotiations between the agency and UBS have yielded little progress.

The two mortgage giants acquired the securities in the years before the housing market collapsed as they expanded rapidly and looked for new investments that were seemingly safe. At issue in this case are so-called private-label securities that were backed by subprime and other risky loans but were rated as safe AAA investments by the ratings agencies.

In the years before 2007, “the market was so frothy then it was hard to find good quality loans to securitize and hold in your portfolio,” said David Felt, a lawyer who served as deputy general counsel of the finance agency until January 2010. “Fannie and Freddie thought they were taking AAA tranches, and like so many investors, they were surprised when they didn’t turn out to be such quality investments.”

Fannie and Freddie had other reasons to buy the securities, Mr. Rood added. For starters, they carried higher yields at a time when the two mortgage giants could buy them using money borrowed at rock-bottom rates, thanks to the implicit federal guarantee they enjoyed.

In addition, by law Fannie and Freddie were required to back loans to low-to-moderate income and minority borrowers, and the private-label securities were counted toward those goals.

“Competitive pressures and onerous housing goals compelled them to operate more like hedge funds than government-sponsored guarantors, ” Mr. Rood said.

In fact, Freddie was warned by regulators in 2006 that its purchases of subprime securities had outpaced its risk management abilities, but the company continued to load up on debt that ultimately soured.

As of June 30, Freddie Mac holds more than $80 billion in mortgage securities backed by more shaky home loans like subprime mortgages, Option ARM and Alt-A loans. Freddie estimates its total gross losses stand at roughly $19 billion. Fannie Mae holds $38 billion of securities backed by Alt-A and subprime loans, with losses standing at nearly $14 billion.

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