Is "We Can't Find The Title" a barrier to your foreclosure"? Are your homeowners exerting

[jtuck004]

their rights, protected by those crazy regulations, like "Statue of Limitations"? Are you having to use the old "We know you see us as a multi-billion dollar black hole for your hard-earned tax money, but really "the dog ate the real title" excuse too often?

No Longer - Call Us Today

From Naked Capitalism (and there is a new post detailing thousands of cases of "lost summonhs", implying improper service by the foreclosure mills.)

4ClosureFraud Posts Lender Processing Services Mortgage Document Fabrication Price Sheet

A bombshell has dropped in mortgage land.

We’ve said for some time that document fabrication is widespread in foreclosures. The reason is that the note, which is the borrower IOU, is the critical instrument to establishing the right to foreclose in 45 states (in those states, the mortgage, which is the lien on the property, is a mere “accessory” to the note).

The pooling and servicing agreement, which governs the creation of mortgage backed securities, called for the note to be endorsed (wet ink signatures) through the full chain of title. That means that the originator had to sign the note over to an intermediary party (there were usually at least two), who’d then have to endorse it over to the next intermediary party, and the final intermediary would have to endorse it over to the trustee on behalf of a specified trust (the entity that holds all the notes). This had to be done by closing; there were limited exceptions up to 90 days out...
...
We finally have concrete proof of how widespread document fabrication was. For some reason the ScribD embeds aren’t working correctly, you can view the entire Lender Processing Services price sheet here, ...
...
Also notice that there is a price for creating allonges. We discussed earlier that phony allonges have become the preferred fix for the failure to convey notes properly:

Read about it here...

[d_r]

1. freaking amazing

[jtuck004]

2. I can't figure out where we lost the motivation to insist on a line

snaking from the investment banks or their servicers (like these good folks) to the courthouse, to prison.

Cops comes on and shows these little 15 and 17 year olds being tasered, kicked, beaten, (they were running, mostly, but still) and dragged off to jail while the people that run these mortgage institutions are still showing up to work in their white shirts and eating at home with the family every night.

It doesn't really matter whether you are a democrat or a republithug, this can't sit well with most anyone who has a moral...oops, I think I figured out the problem.

[struggle4progress]

3. If corporate America has really chosen to defraud folk of their homes wholesale, expect gunfire

[jtuck004]

7. Oh, I wish they wouldn't. The pitchforks and torches memory

should stay just that. I get the satisfaction it seems that would bring. But I think that is a losing strategy.

It would be so much more satisfying to watch someone move to a rental, get involved with a group that would start to learn who their enemies REALLY are, figure out how to prod some political party in the correct place, and just maybe we will get to see the Nancy Grace "Investment Billionaires Take The Perp Walk" episode. That could start a whole cascade of responsibility from Washington to the corporate world. Kinda like watching the mayor and most of the city council in Bell, CA get their pictures on Reuters. :rofl:

I am also aware that for millions of people the house may be what they poured everything into, and "those SOB's" have caused them to lose it, even though they did everything right, just like they were taught. But it is all going wrong, and they have no real outs. They will view the next person who comes to the door wanting their home as the enemy.

I hope they can find a path with a future. It won't be easy, but we could sure use them.

[struggle4progress]

10. The legal system is supposed to promise people an objective way to resolve their disputes: if

companies who don't actually have real claims on people's houses are able to game the system to dispossess people of their property unjustly, and if lots of people are victimized inn this manner, then people will become increasingly cynical about the possibilities for fair treatment by the law.

[jtuck004]

13. Sure, and that has happened since the beginning of this country

and before.

but never has a generation or 3 or 4 been able to sit on their asses with as much leisure time, able to watch cable, not really worry about whether there would be food, (just how relatively poison it is), and watch in rapt fascination as their economy was systematically disassembled and moved away, while their dollars were vacuumed up by an increasingly smaller number of people.

Now, all these folks are mad, perhaps, but mad at their neighbors, mad at the lady who dared to stand up and say they were wrong at a council meeting, etc. Not mad at the people who are really their opressors (or competitors, etc).

They might be cynical, but I don't see them getting involved and figuring out who there real oppressors are for at least another generation or two, and by that time this will be a global world that they can't possibly overcome. I don't see most people rising up, and the ones that do will be shot.

Maybe the ones that win will be those who figure out how to cooperate with others so they can own the assets and out-market the crooks, all the while gaining political power.

Or, one's time might be better spent learning one of the Chinese languages. Wish someone would tell me what to focus on...

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. I just found a WONDERFUL side piece to your posted topic, jtuck.

The beginning of the story...
It's a transcript of a NPR piece about how these mortgage bonds came into being, and it reads like a detective story, absolutely great piece.
Yo pull back after reading it, having now seen the entire picture, from beginning to almost end
( the cover-up of the fraud is really leading to the end, because the Association of Mortgage Investors has just called for the banks to take responsibility for the fraud!!!)http://www.scribd.com/doc/23757019/The-Giant-Pool-of-Money-How-They-Transfered-the-Wealth

anyhow, I am goofy enough to love reading this stuff, and here is the link to the story, it is Scribe format on the webpage, easy to read.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/23757019/The-Giant-Pool-of-Money-How-They-Transfered-the-Wealth

essentially it tells why this mortgage fraud has the potential to be a huge black hole of destruction for banks,
houses, ALL homeowners, and people who think they will get pensions between now and "someday".

edited to add:
You will love the part when 23 dead people got mortgages!!!!!!

[jtuck004]

9. When people start arguing that the customers were

the proximate cause of our financial crisis, I think of things like "23 dead people got mortgages", or the
people who investigators found that did not provide the data that was sent in under their names, the
out and out wholesale abrogation of responsiblity that occurred in the "race to the cash".


From your link...

"Alex Blumberg: This is Glen Pizzolorusso, who was an area sales manager at an
outfit called WMC mortgage in upstate New York. Just to repeat, he was making 75
to a 100 grand a month. That's over a million dollars a year. Glen was just out of
college. His job was a lot like Mike Garner's, he was the same link in the chain, and
Glen loved his job.

Glen Pizzolorusso: What is that movie? Boiler Room? That's what it's like. I
mean, it's the cooling thing ever. Cubicle, cubicle, cubicle for 150,000 sq.
ft. The ceilings were probably 25 or 30 feet high. The elevator had a big
graffiti painting. Big open space. And it was awesome. We lived
mortgage. That’s all we did. This deal, that deal. How we gonna get it funded?
What’s the problem with this one? That's all everyone's talking about."
...
Alex Blumberg: Glen had five cars, a 1.5 million dollar vacation house in
Connecticut, and penthouse that he rented in Manhattan. And he made all this
money making very large loans to very poor people with bad credit.
...
Alex Blumberg: But Glen didn't worry about whether the loans were good. That's
someone else's problem. And this way of thinking thrived at every step of this
mortgage security chain. A guy like Mike Francis, from Morgan Stanley, he told me
he bought loans, lots of loans, from Glen's company, and he knew in his gut they
were bad loans. Like these NINA loans.

When I get into conversations with people who insist on looking at the little $1.3 trillion brick of sub-prime in the the $160 trillion Great Wall of Disaster that Wall Street and company brought us, I have real trouble understanding their point of view. They completely miss who is the enemy. In the published documents since the financial crisis hit it is clear that thousands of these signers didn't have a chance...and certainly everyone with any kind of mgmt responsiblity on Wall Street, and a not-insignificant number of those in the mortgage houses that were combing these neighborhoods for loans, knew long before everything blew up that if the housing market fell off, these loans would crater. And they just didn't ignore the probability of what would happen, they out and out told people it would never happen, and dug their bony, evil fingers deep into pensions and municipal\state governments.

People in two administrations have taken them off the hook they hung themselves on, and we are paying an awful price.

Thank you for posting this.

[customerserviceguy]

5. Ok, maybe too many people have played 'Monopoly'

but a real estate title isn't a piece of paper. Even the thing you call a 'title' for your car is only a "Certificate of Title".

What's the difference, you ask? Well, your car's title is a registered title, few things can be done to the status of that vehicle's ownership without changing the registration. A mechanic's lien on the car for repairs done is about the only exception I can think of.

A niggle? Perhaps, but the title of the OP really galls me about the ignorance of people on this subject. Yes, a flawed foreclosure process can muddy things up mightily, but it just means that someone has to go back and do it properly. It might delay by a few months the length of time it takes to throw somebody out, but unless they can come up with enough money to pay it off, or qualify for a refinance with lousy credit in a tight lending market, the result is going to be the same.

This economy doesn't turn around until the foreclosures stop for market reasons, and anything that delays that day just prolongs the pain.

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. The article clearly outlines why the lack of legal title IS a big deal.

And the OP title is a clear representation of why the Docx company was created.

[customerserviceguy]

8. There is a concept called 'legal title'

However, the concept of 'lost the title' applies only to the board game. This company was created to help lenders figure out how to foreclose with the proper procedure, and all their ducks in a row.

[jtuck004]

11. Maybe not just a board game, according to a growing number of state's

Attorney's General...

http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/10/03/continuing-foreclosure-fraud-unraveling-creating-blighted-titles/

[dixiegrrrrl]

12. Ala. is a non-judicial state.

Every week for the past 2 years, dozens of foreclosure notices in the paper by MERS.
And a few by some law outfit up in Montgomery for Chase Bank.
Mostly MERS, tho.
None of the people being mortgaged on know how to fight them, the learning curve locally is kinda flat.

Being such a red state, I do not look towards our AG to do diddly.The forthcoming trial against Countrywide Financial’s Angelo Mozilo

[customerserviceguy]

14. While your cartoon is possibly funny

it has no basis in fact. I, for instance, would not be able to buy some faked up crap to 'steal' somebody's home. All the homes involved have mortages signed by the homeowners, if they didn't know what they were getting into when they signed the loans, that's their mistake.

Just because there are hundreds of thousands of foreclosures in the pipeline at any one time, with the inevitable mistakes that will be made in any sort of paper-pushing operation, does not somehow make the mortgages go away all by themselves, like Dudley Do-Right vanquishing Snidley Whiplash. There's another piece of pop culture that has unduly influenced what people think they know about real estate.

[jtuck004]

15. Suspiciously Large Number of "The Dog Ate My Summons" filings...

You may be correct, but there seem to be at least enough reports that it has caused legal action and has a number of legal authorities investigating the process. And, frankly, on the surface it sure seems like there are much larger number of issues than I would expect someone to project under such a large number of foreclosures, and a lot of it seems to go beyond the "I forgot a signature" line, in my limited experience. But it sounds like you have more experience. And involvement.

I do think the housing market needs to decline to get closer to it's true pricing levels. And even if all the foreclosures were done tomorrow, there is still the fact of a minimum of $4 trillion in debt over the current market worth of homes, from what I have read. Thus why the mark-to-myth accounting rule from the FASB, which may well be prolonging the pain.

But we bailed out a bunch of really, really wealthy people, without much if any apparent liability, and now it seems that these same firms, or their agents, are potentially skirting the law in booting people out of homes whose financing seemed perfectly reasonable, (ie, not NINA loans) at the time. If this is what they are doing to cure their grievance, , I am glad somebody is raising the issue.

Most people cheered Dudley, as I recall. If the reckless, greedy, criminal investment bankers suffer the same fate as ol' Snidely, (who, ironically enough, seemed to make a career out of assult with intent to kill. The investment bankers, even when they knew the market was in trouble, began to leverage on more unsupportable debt, which may well have led to deaths through their negligence), I don't know of anyone that is going to shed much of a tear. I won't. And any mortgage brokers that aided and abetted in the more illicit practices of their malfeasance can go right along with 'em.

ymmv.

[customerserviceguy]

17. While I agree that the banksters got away with something big

We simply cannot prop up the entire housing market. The money that would have to be printed would give us Argentina-like inflation.

As for my experience, I spent over two decades in the title insurance business, the last time I worked in it was over five years ago, when the bubble started to finally pop. I've seen a number of smaller bubbles rise and fall, but this one was jacked bigger (and was doomed to fall harder) than all the other ones. At least in the popping of the late 1970's bubble, prices stabilized fairly quickly by 1983, and they didn't decline much. They've been in free-fall for the last few years, with no end in sight.

The errors being made are by little people at the bottom, who just simply have too much to have to do, to do it all 100% correctly. The market is starting to deal with the mistakes, as more title insurers will simply decline to cover properties that have had shaky foreclosure procedings. They know that they're ultimately the ones who will pay for any mistakes that somebody really has a possible claim over.

[Po_d Mainiac]

16. You are wrong

Quit Claim deeds are again in vogue.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/massive-mortgage-mess-update-title-companies-stop-insuring-foreclosed-properties

edit to add link

[dixiegrrrrl]

18. Looks like Docx is out of business now.

It is a subsidiary of Lenders Processing systems, whose stock has been hit by short sellers.
LPS says:
"Docx did not prepare or execute affidavits containing substantive borrower information

and no longer provides document preparation services."

Oh..well, if Docx has done nothing wrong, why is it no longer doing it?

see LPS statement today:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/LPS-Comments-on-Recent-prnews-849112311.html?x=0&.v=1