Ritholtz: Why foreclosure fraud is so dangerous to property rights

[boutons_deux]

NY equities boss pleads guilty in $66 million mortgage fraud case

The president of a New York brokerage firm pleaded guilty on Monday to conspiracy in a $66 million mortgage fraud scheme -- the latest victory in U.S. President Barack Obama's campaign against financial fraud.

Gerard Canino, President of First Class Equities, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud in a New York federal court, said the U.S. Attorney's Office. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 30 years prison.

"As the president and owner of First Class Equities, Gerard Canino should have promoted responsible homeownership and protected the integrity of the mortgage finance industry," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

"Instead, he used his firm to commit a massive mortgage fraud scheme that left scores of foreclosed properties in its wake. With today's plea, Canino now stands convicted for his role in this brazen scheme."

Canino's lawyer, Stuart Kaplan, described his client as "contrite and forthright in accepting his responsibility."

The U.S. Attorney's Office said Canino and his firm recruited "straw buyers" - people who posed as home buyers to purchase distressed properties but who had no intention of paying the mortgages.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...e=domesticNews

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Just a rogue, the entire financial sector is otherwise a paragon of truth and honesty.

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Long article, but the list of crimes is longer and longer. And health problems (car accident, not smoking or drinking) drained her finances.

The Great American Foreclosure Story: The Struggle for Justice and a Place to Call Home

The story of how she ended up in a tent is the story of how America ended up in a foreclosure crisis that has not ended, that still drags down the economy and threatens to force millions of families from their homes. Already, banks have foreclosed on more than 4 million homes since the crisis began in 2007. With almost 6 million loans still in danger of foreclosure, 2012 could very well be the worst year yet. Ramos' story is remarkable not because it's unique but because it isn't.

Her story doesn't fit any of the conventional narratives. Ramos is not a helpless victim. She made mistakes. But she didn't take out her mortgages to splurge on luxuries or build a new wing for her house. She took out her first mortgage to live the free-market dream of starting her own business. She took out later mortgages to cope with injuries sustained in a car accident.

her downfall was abetted by a mortgage industry so profit-driven and disconnected from homeowners that the common interests once linking lender and borrower have been severed. The lending arms of the nation's largest financial ins utions helped plunge the country into crisis through their abuses and blunders, and they responded to that crisis with still more abuses and blunders — this time in how they handled people facing foreclosure. For subprime borrowers like Ramos, it has been as hard to work their way out of trouble as it was easy for them to get the loans that started their downfall. The millions of prime borrowers who thought they were doing everything right, only to be caught in a historic wave of unemployment, have been forced to endure a similar gauntlet of delays, errors and traps.

The industry developed tactics of dubious legality — not just robo-signing, which most Americans have heard of by now, but an array of business practices, some dating to the 1990s, that were designed to skirt the law and fatten profits. The federal and state governments largely tolerated these practices until they pushed Ramos into a tent and all of us into the Great Recession.

http://www.propublica.org/article/th...place-t/single

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We can look at the foreclosure crisis as the pre-emininent law enforcement crisis of our time: Elite impunity for crimes committed and still being committed by lenders and servicers (“banksters”) on a massive scale. We can also look the foreclosure crsis as an issue of jurisprudence, where a revolutionary oligarchy seeks to change the nature of law itself.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/...=Google+Reader

[boutons_deux]

Lenders Again Dealing Credit to Risky Clients


But as financial ins utions recover from the losses on loans made to troubled borrowers, some of the largest lenders to the less than creditworthy, including Capital One and GM Financial, are trying to woo them back, while HSBC and JPMorgan Chase are among those tiptoeing again into subprime lending.


Credit card lenders gave out 1.1 million new cards to borrowers with damaged credit in December, up 12.3 percent from the same month a year earlier, according to Equifax's credit trends report released in March. These borrowers accounted for 23 percent of new auto loans in the fourth quarter of 2011, up from 17 percent in the same period of 2009, Experian, a credit scoring firm, said.


Consumer advocates and lawyers worry that the financial ins utions are again preying on the most vulnerable and least financially sophisticated borrowers, who are often willing to take out credit at any cost.


"These people are addicted to credit, and banks are pushing it," said Charles Juntikka, a bankruptcy lawyer in Manhattan.


The banks, for their part, are looking to make up the billions in fee income wiped out by regulations enacted after the financial crisis by focusing on two parts of their business - the high and the low ends - industry consultants say. Subprime borrowers typically pay high interest rates, up to 29 percent, and often rack up fees for late payments.


Some former banking regulators said they worried that this kind of lending, even in its early stages, signaled a potentially dangerous return to the same risky lending that helped fuel the credit crisis.


"It's clear that we are returning to business as usual," said Mark T. Williams, a former Federal Reserve bank examiner.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=937292&f=19

[Winehole23]

We can look at the foreclosure crisis as the pre-emininent law enforcement crisis of our time: Elite impunity for crimes committed and still being committed by lenders and servicers (“banksters”) on a massive scale. We can also look the foreclosure crsis as an issue of jurisprudence, where a revolutionary oligarchy seeks to change the nature of law itself.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/...=Google+Reader

good read, thanks for posting.

[boutons_deux]

How A Goldman Sachs Mortgage Servicer Foreclosed On Homeowners After Losing Their Do ents In India

Adding to the list of horrors, ProPublica found that Litton Loan Servicing, which was owned by Goldman Sachs at the time, denied many troubled homeowners mortgage modifications after sending their paperwork to India and losing it:

When homeowners faxed their do ents, they didn’t go to Litton, [former employee Chris Wyatt] says. They went to India, where a low-cost company scanned and filed the do ents — but often misfiled or lost them. Wyatt says Litton routinely denied modifications because homeowners had not sent their do ents when, in fact, they had.

In a process internally referred to as a “denial sweep,” Litton’s computers would automatically generate denial letters for every homeowner who, according to Litton’s records, hadn’t sent their do ents. But untold numbers of those do ents had been lost on another continent. Wyatt complained about the practice in multiple meetings with senior management, he says, but managers were chiefly worried about reducing the overwhelming backlog.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/201...ortgage-india/

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A bunch of ing elite robbers.

[Winehole23]

The Florida Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments Thursday in a lawsuit that could undo hundreds of thousands of foreclosures and open up banks to severe financial liabilities in the state where they face the bulk of their foreclosure-fraud litigation.


The court is deciding whether banks who used fraudulent do ents to file foreclosure lawsuits can dismiss the cases and refile them later with different paperwork.


The decision, which may take up to eight months to render, could affect hundreds of thousands of homeowners in Florida, and could also influence judges in the other 26 states that require lawsuits in foreclosures.


Of all the foreclosure filings in those states, sixty three percent, a total of 138,288, are concentrated in five states, according to RealtyTrac, an online foreclosure marketplace. Of those, nearly half are in Florida. In Congressional testimony last year, Bank of America (BAC.N), the U.S.'s largest mortgage servicer, said that 70 percent of its foreclosure-related lawsuits were in Florida.


The case at issue, known as Roman Pino v. Bank of New York Mellon, stems from the so-called robo-signing scandal that emerged in 2010 when it was revealed that banks and their law firms had hired low-wage workers to sign legal do ents without checking their accuracy as is required by law.


"This was a case of an intentionally fraudulent do ent fabricated to use in a court proceeding," says former U.S. Attorney Kendall Coffey, author of the book Foreclosures in Florida.


If the Supreme Court rules against the banks, "a broad universe of mortgages could be rendered unenforceable," Coffey says. "The cost to the financial industry is difficult to estimate, but it could be substantial."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...84902920120510

[Winehole23]

Wells Fargo & Co. and a former vice president have agreed to pay more than $6.5 million to settle federal accusations that they peddled tricky mortgage-related investments without understanding the complexities of the financial products or disclosing the risks to investors.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said the improper sales were made in 2007 by Wells Fargo Brokerage Services in Minneapolis, now known as Wells Fargo Securities, and specifically by Shawn McMurtry, the vice president who recommended and sold some of the products.


The SEC said Tuesday that the bank and McMurtry settled administrative proceedings without admitting or denying the findings.



The SEC said Wells Fargo sold asset-backed commercial paper structured with risky mortgage bonds and collateralized debt obligations to several “generally conservative” customers including municipalities and nonprofits. It said customers lost money after three of the investments defaulted.


Instead of determining the true nature of the products and explaining them to the customers, Wells Fargo’s representatives “relied almost exclusively upon their credit ratings,” the SEC said in announcing its allegations Tuesday.
“Municipalities and other nonprofit ins utions were harmed because Wells Fargo abdicated its fundamental responsibility as a broker to have a reasonable basis for its investment recommendations to customers,” said Elaine C. Greenberg, head of an SEC municipal securities and public pensions unit.


The case is relatively small. Last month, Wells Fargo, again without admitting guilt, agreed to pay $175 million to settle Justice Department allegations that it discriminated against minority borrowers.

http://www.latimes.com/business/mone...,6077633.story

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http://www.latimes.com/business/mone...,6077633.story

As always, as with STandard Charter's fine, WF very certainly make a lot more from selling this crap than $5.6M, which is just a cost of doing ty business.

And how much did their buyers lose? WF should be forced to make up any buyers' losses.

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

As always, as with STandard Charter's fine, WF very certainly make a lot more from selling this crap than $5.6M, which is just a cost of doing ty business.

sure. if the roles were reversed, and people got $100 fines for stealing $100,000 from the bank, you'd see a whole lot more bank robberies.

[Winehole23]

FDIC Sues Banks for $2.1 Billion





AUSTIN (CN) - The FDIC, as receiver for Guaranty Bank, demands more than $2.1 billion from major banks that underwrote and sold securities backed by residential mortgages.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. claims the banks pushed and sold the securities with false statements about the quality of the underlying mortgages.

The FDIC demands $900.6 million from these defendants, which charged Guaranty Bank $1.8 billion for eight certificates: Ally Securities; Goldman, Sachs & Co.; Deutsche Bank Securities; J.P. Morgan Securities; Structured Asset Mortgage Investments II; and The Bear Stearns Cos.

In a second complaint, the FDIC demands $677.4 million from these defendants, which charged Guaranty Bank $2.1 billion for 20 certificates: J.P. Morgan Securities fka Bear, Stearns & Co.; Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith; RBS Securities; WaMu Asset Acceptance Corp.; and WaMu Capital Corp.

In the third complaint, the FDIC demands $559.7 million from these defendants, which charged Guaranty Bank $1.5 billion for eight certificates: Countrywide Securities Corp.; CWALT, Inc.; Countrywide Financial Corp.; Bank of America Corp.; Deutsche Bank Securities; and Goldman, Sachs & Co.
All the lawsuits are in Travis County Court.

http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/08/21/49463.htm

[Winehole23]

Two landmark developments on Aug. 16 give momentum to the growing interest of cities and counties in addressing the mortgage crisis using eminent domain:

1. The Washington State Supreme Court held in Bain v. MERS, et al., that an electronic database called Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS) is not a "beneficiary" en led to foreclose under a deed of trust; and
2. San Bernardino County, Calif., passed a resolution to consider plans to use eminent domain to address the glut of underwater borrowers by purchasing and refinancing their loans.

MERS is the electronic smokescreen that allowed banks to build their securitization Ponzi scheme without worrying about details like ownership and chain of le. According to property law attorney Neil Garfield, properties were sold to multiple investors or conveyed to empty trusts, subprime securities were endorsed as triple A, and banks earned up to 40 times what they could earn on a paying loan, using credit default swaps in which they bet the loan would go into default. As the dust settles from collapse of the scheme, homeowners are left with underwater mortgages with no legitimate owners to negotiate with. The solution now being considered is for municipalities to simply take ownership of the mortgages through eminent domain. This would allow them to clear le and start fresh, along with some other lucrative dividends.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-...b_1820591.html

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Citigroup in $590 Million Settlement of Subprime Lawsuit

Citigroup said on Wednesday that it had agreed to pay $590 million to settle a class action lawsuit brought by shareholders who contended that they had been misled about the bank's exposure to subprime mortgage debt on the eve of the financial crisis.

The shareholder lawsuit, originally filed in November 2007, alleged that former officers and directors of Citigroup had "concealed the company's failure to write down impaired securities containing subprime debt" at a time when the collapse in the mortgage market made it apparent that banks including Citi would be adversely impacted. In late 2007, Citigroup wrote down billions of dollars on collateralized debt obligations tied to subprime debt, and reported a fourth-quarter loss of $9.83 billion that year.

For Citigroup, as well as other Wall Street firms, the business of slicing apart and packaging mortgages and other loans into complex securities had been a lucrative and fast-growing business before the financial crisis. The bank underwrote some $70 billion in C.D.O.'s from 2004 to 2008.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/08/29...wsuit.xml?f=19

criminal fraud, a handslap fine that nowhere approaches the proceeds from the fraud, nobody to jail, the lawyers eat a lot of the fine, defrauded shareholders get almost nothing.

[Wild Cobra]

So the shareholders will be taking more money... Interesting lawsuit!

[Winehole23]

ex FDIC chief Sheila Bair whacks the HAMP program in her new book and on HuffPo:

Former bank regulator Sheila Bair cringed when President Barack Obama promised at an Arizona high school gymnasium in 2009 that his administration could save millions of homes from foreclosure.

"If lenders and home buyers work together, and the lender agrees to offer rates that the borrower can afford, then we'll make up part of the gap between what the old payments were and what the new payments will be," Obama said, explaining the program with Bair at his side. "And this will enable as many as 3 to 4 million homeowners to modify the terms of their mortgages to avoid foreclosure."


In her new book, "Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself," Bair recounts how her own housing proposals were passed over in favor of a much weaker program, which she knew would never save 4 million homes. Bair served as chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation until July 2011.
"At the Phoenix announcement, the president was masterful in announcing the program, though I cringed as he threw out what I considered to be wildly inflated numbers on the programs' impact," Bair wrote. "Even with our own, more aggressive proposal, we had estimated the number of successful modifications at 2.1 million tops."


The plan, known officially as the Home Affordable Modification Program, offers struggling homeowners reduced monthly payments through a standardized modification process. The program won't reach its goal of 3 to 4 million restructured loans, but it recently achieved a sadder milestone: 1 million failed modifications. Fewer than 900,000 homeowners are making modified payments, which are typically $500 lower than before the modification.


The huge number of loans that needed to be reworked, combined with burdensome do entation requirements and a lackluster effort on the part of banks' mortgage servicing divisions, guaranteed the program was "doomed to failure," according to Bair.


"What's more, it cheated borrowers," she wrote. "Because Treasury wanted to demonstrate quickly that huge numbers of borrowers were being modified, it let borrowers enter into 'trial modifications' whereby they would start making reduced payments pending completion of all of their paperwork. But many of the borrowers could not provide all of the extensive do entation required by the program, so they would be put into foreclosure even though they had been making timely payments for months!"


Bair's book describes Obama as engaged and knowledgable about housing recovery efforts, but undermined by his aides, particularly Treasury Secretary Tim Geither and former economic adviser Larry Summers.


"HAMP was a program designed to look good in a press release, not to fix the housing market," Bair wrote. "Larry and Tim didn't seem to care about the political beating the president took on the hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at the big-bank bailouts and AIG bonuses, but when it came to home owners, it was a very different store. I don't think helping home owners was ever a priority for them."


Bair's book echoes the criticism in Neil Barofsky's "Bailout," another recent insider account of the Obama administration's housing failures.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1912699.html

[TeyshaBlue]

you, Wells Fargo.


Feds hit Wells Fargo with mortgage-fraud suit

http://www.latimes.com/business/mone...0,353496.story

[Winehole23]

wrongly certified loans? you'd think banks would look after their nut a little better.

[Winehole23]

oh wait: in our capitalistic, peerlessly free market system, who pays for the losses?

[Winehole23]

excuse me, paid for the losses.

[Winehole23]

banks held a gun to their own heads. Bush, Obama and the US Congress took the gun away and emptied the clip in the US taxpayer.

[Winehole23]

instead of letting them fall on their faces, as they rightfully should have in the free enterprise scenario.

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wrongly certified loans? you'd think banks would look after their nut a little better.

not if they can pocket the mortgage-initiation fees and dump the mortgages on investors.

key regulation change: mortgage initiators must hold/service the mortgage to maturity (THEN they will qualify the borrower thoroughly)

[Wild Cobra]

not if they can pocket the mortgage-initiation fees and dump the mortgages on investors.

key regulation change: mortgage initiators must hold/service the mortgage to maturity (THEN they will qualify the borrower thoroughly)

Not very often that I agree with you... You have a great idea. No bundling and selling of loans. Keep the loan makers responsible.

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But, don't be too hard the banks.

The Repugs have assured us for years that F&F, CRA, ACORN bullied the pitiful banks into crime, fraud, and theft.