Foreclosure Nation

A total of 25,485 suspicious activity reports (SARs) involving alleged mortgage fraud were submitted to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) during the first quarter of this year. According to a report released by the federal agency Tuesday, that tally is up 31 percent from 19,420 in ...

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Years have passed since the housing crisis first brought the U.S. economy to the brink, but reports of mortgage fraud are only increasing, up 31 percent in the first quarter of 2011, according to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a Treasury bureau that tracks illegal financial activity. In ...

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Ocean Bank's latest consent order cites "weaknesses in asset quality, management, earnings, capital, liquidity, sensitivity to market risk, and its Bank Secrecy Act program." Ocean Bank of Miami has entered into an updated consent order with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that addresses its b...

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The Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday that JPMorgan Chase has agreed to pay $153.6 million to settle charges that it misled investors in a complex mortgage securities transaction just as the housing market was starting to plummet. The New York-based financial institution noted in a s...

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Federal regulators with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) have issued notices extending the deadline for 12 of 14 mortgage servicers to submit their action plans for conducting foreclosure reviews. As part of the consent agreements annou...

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WASHINGTON — The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency today announced formal enforcement actions against eight national bank mortgage servicers and two third-party servicer providers for unsafe and unsound practices related to residential mortgage loan servicing and foreclosure processing. The...

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Accused mortgage-modification fraudster Howard Shmuckler has lost the website he used to call his accusers “the real scammers.” Even though Shmuckler had been indicted and repeatedly sued for charging homeowners for modifications he never delivered, he maintained his website until a court order wen...

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Data released Monday shows an increase in mortgage related fraud in areas with high rates of foreclosure activities and underwater borrowers. Risk analytics firm Interthinx released its annual Mortgage Fraud Risk Report which analyzes loan applications and determines the most significant mortgage ...

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The financial meltdown has not slowed loan scams, as South Florida ranked first in mortgage fraud suspicious activity reports (SARs) per capita, according to the latest report from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Mortgage fraud can be added to the list of other financial crimes f...

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The FBI and the MBA entered into an agreement to combat mortgage fraud, and will > make available a Mortgage Fraud Warning Notice as a "proactive means of educating > consumers and mortgage-lending professionals of the penalties and consequences of > this criminal activity." FBIMBAFraud [http://r...

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Washington, D.C. (Source: FBI) – Today the FBI and the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) entered into an agreement to combat Mortgage Fraud. The FBI and the MBA will make available a Mortgage Fraud Warning Notice as a proactive means of educating consumers and mortgage-lending professionals of the ...

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Apparently seeing an opportunity in the wave of mortgage foreclosures, opportunists are using vacant homes as an invitation to work a scam, Florida officials say. By filing a fraudulent quit-claim deed they can tie up the title and either live in the home themselves or rent it out while the true ow...

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When Mohammed Shukran took some time off from driving his cab to care for two ailing family members in 2009, he began worrying about the mortgage on his Flushing, N.Y., home. He enlisted the services of a company called Save My Home, which charged him $3,000 for a promise to get his bank to lower hi...

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LONDON — Police have arrested nine people, including two of Britain's wealthiest entrepreneurs, on suspicion of fraud in connection with the 2008 collapse of Iceland's Kaupthing bank during the global financial crisis. Britain's Serious Fraud Office said seven men aged between 42 and 54 were held i...

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It’s amazing how one company’s finances can get so warped just by overvaluing obsolete military inventory and a few other accounting sleights-of-hand. But that’s the picture federal authorities are painting about Pompano Beach-based Point Blank Solutions (Pink Sheets: PBSOQ), formerly DHB Industrie...

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Indictments unsealed Tuesday charge three South Florida residents with mortgage fraud in the Versailles neighborhood of Wellington, in Palm Beach County. According to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, fraud charges were unsealed against Patrick Brinson, 34, of Miami; David Lam, 42, of...

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Fraud is rampant, but there are many issues to consider in bringing litigation or taking actions to recover losses arising out of a fraudulent transaction. Often, what looks like a fraud and smells like a fraud is, in fact, a fraud. Sometimes the fraud is plainly evident, such as a clear misreprese...

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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Tom Bernard was swayed by a simple e-mail pitch in June 2009: he could make money from home by building his own web site, using the expert software and accounting assets from a company called Ivy Capital. Out of work and desperate for income, he reluctantly agreed to pay $6,88...

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The WikiLeaks-allied hacker group Anonymous has posted a series of emails purported to be from a former Bank of America employee, which the organization says prove "corruption and fraud" at the nation's largest bank. In a release announced with the Twitter hashtag #BlackMonday, Anoymous posted th...

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Count me among those who were glad to see the documentary “Inside Job” win an Oscar. The film reminded us that the financial crisis of 2008, whose aftereffects are still blighting the lives of millions of Americans, didn’t just happen — it was made possible by bad behavior on the part of bankers, re...

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Raymond E. Bowman, the former president of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp., pleaded guilty to two charges over his role in what U.S. prosecutors said was a $1.9 billion fraud scheme. Bowman, 45, of Ocala, Florida, entered his plea today in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, to one count ...

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A group of Internet hackers has released internal emails that they say proves Bank of America committed mortgage fraud by “knowingly hiding foreclosure info from federal auditors.” The hacker group, Anonymous, claims to have obtained a slew of inter-departmental emails from a former employee of Ba...

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The chief executive of Beazer Homes, Ian J. McCarthy, agreed to return $6.5 million in compensation that he had received while the company was accused of accounting fraud, the Securities and Exchange Commission said on Thursday. Mr. McCarthy, 58, had not reimbursed Beazer for bonuses and other inc...

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More home owners are falling prey to scams that promise to “stop the foreclosure” and “save your home.” The Federal Trade Commission has released a report to help borrowers avoid falling victim to such scams, here are a few of its tips: 1. Watch for outlandish claims. "Eliminate your debt!" ...

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U.S. securities regulators are probing whether some mutual funds have overstated the value of thinly traded risky municipal bonds at a time when investors were withdrawing money from muni-bond funds, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The probe by the U.S. Sec...

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Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have dropped their criminal investigation into Angelo R. Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide Financial, once the nation’s largest mortgage lender, according to a person with direct knowledge of the investigation. The closure of the case after two ye...

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Rep. Darrell Issa, on Wednesday asked that a subpoena be issued to Bank of America, requesting the company hand over any documents related to the “Friends of Angelo” program formerly offered by Countrywide Financial. The “VIP” program was dubbed Friends of Angelo because it was headed by former Cou...

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A new study by analytics firm Interthinx says mortgage fraud risk has been spreading from ZIP code to ZIP code. The company’s quarterly Mortgage Fraud Risk Report covers data collected from the fourth quarter of 2010 and tracks overall and type-specific mortgage fraud risk. It provides an in-depth ...

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The U.S. Justice Department has ended a criminal investigation of former Countrywide Financial Corp. Chief Executive Officer Angelo Mozilo and won’t bring charges, a person familiar with the investigation said. The person asked not to be identified because the investigation hadn’t been made public....

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More than two years have passed since Bernard Madoff was arrested for a massive Ponzi scheme which spanned 16 years and consumed roughly $20 billion in lost cash and nearly $65 billion in paper wealth, and the search for who was complicit is still heating up. Now, in his first interview for public...

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JPMorgan Chase is being sued by Allstate insurance company for fraud, in the latest example of a big bank being accused of knowingly selling a poor-quality product. In a lawsuit dated Wednesday, the insurance company accuses the bank of knowing that the bundles of loans it was selling were very lik...

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More than two years have passed since Bernard Madoff was arrested for a massive Ponzi scheme which spanned 16 years and consumed roughly $20 billion in lost cash and nearly $65 billion in paper wealth, and the search for who was complicit is still heating up. Now, in his first interview for publ...

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JPMorgan Chase is being sued by Allstate insurance company for fraud, in the latest example of a big bank being accused of knowingly selling a poor-quality product. In a lawsuit dated Wednesday, the insurance company accuses the bank of knowing that the bundles of loans it was selling were very l...

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The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged three former executives at IndyMac Bancorp with securities fraud for misleading investors about the lender’s failing financial condition. The executives, former CEO Michael Perry, and former CFOs A. Scott Keys and S. Blair Abernathy, alleged...

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So, here's the good news: The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), created in early 2009 from the TARP funds by the Obama Administration, uses federal funds to reduce borrowers' monthly mortgage payments to about a third of the borrower's (pretax) monthly income. The program's website says t...

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WASHINGTON — Federal regulators filed civil fraud charges Friday against three former executives of the parent of IndyMac Bank, accusing them of misleading investors about the mortgage lender's finances before it collapsed in July 2008. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced the charges...

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The securities laws of the United States “substitute a philosophy of disclosure for the philosophy of caveat emptor,” Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote in a Supreme Court decision nearly half a century ago. These days “caveat emptor” — let the buyer beware — is staging a comeback. The trustee in the B...

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Despite the bright spotlight that the housing crisis shined on mortgage fraud, officials say New Yorkers continue to be duped. Now, the city is taking aim at the perpetuators of mortgage fraud through a program that it hopes will root out questionable property transactions and alert officials and ...

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If you are among the many Americans desperately looking for work, then you also might be among the growing number of victims who have fallen prey to job scams. Jobs that promise "easy money," "flexible work from home hours," or advertise "no experience necessary" are just some of the ways con artis...

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FORT LAUDERDALE Controversial developer Glenn Wright was arrested Monday, accused of stealing $20,000 from a homeowners association and giving it to a rabbi to buy a new property for the Downtown Jewish Center, court records show. Wright, 57, of Fort Lauderdale, was charged with grand theft and ...

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Former Bear Stearns mortgage executives who now run mortgage divisions of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Ally Financial have been accused of cheating and defrauding investors through the mortgage securities they created and sold while at Bear. According to e-mails and internal audits, JPMorgan ...

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A lawsuit alleges Countrywide Financial Corp. and two of its former executives misled institutional investors who were stuck with huge losses from mortgage-related investments that they say were portrayed as low-risk. The lawsuit was filed Monday in New York State Supreme Court by investors who bou...

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Without admitting or denying any wrongdoing, Bank of America Corp.'s Merrill Lynch unit has agreed to pay $10 million to settle the Securities and Exchange Commission's charges of securities fraud and charging customers undisclosed trading fees. According to the SEC's report Merrill operated a pro...

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Now that we're in the midst of the post-housing bubble foreclosure mess, it's easy to lose sight of part of how we got here: "liar's loans." Liar's loans were mortgages that didn't require the wannabe borrower to prove she could repay the loan. They came in various flavors, allowing the borrower ...

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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s internal watchdog is reviewing an allegation that Robert Khuzami, the agency’s top enforcement official, gave preferential treatment to Citigroup Inc. executives in the agency’s $75 million settlement with the firm in July. Inspector General H. David K...

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It's outrageous the way subprime borrowers swarmed and solicited unsuspecting lenders and camped out in the offices of investment banks to push them to find ways to finance their insatiable need for capital to purchase homes. It's a scandal the way they got in bed with appraisers to get the home val...

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Federal authorities on Wednesday charged a Palm Beach County consulting firm and 15 people with bank fraud in a complicated scheme to steal money and, for some defendants, support narcotics trafficking. Five of the defendants are identified in court documents as loan officers for large and well-kno...

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Seven South Florida bankers were among 15 people charged today with participating in a $10 million scheme to defraud banks through bogus commercial loans and lines of credits. The federal defendants include a loan broker, seven bank officers and seven customers. “They were taking bribes so they wo...

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After Goldman Sachs escaped the financial crisis with hardly a scratch, the legendary Wall Street bank learned last year that the biggest risk to its business was in Washington. Regulators and lawmakers bloodied the firm, slapping it with a massive fraud suit alleging that it betrayed its clients ...

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Job hunters, consumers trying to dig themselves out of debt and those desperate to earn some extra money on the side were frequent victims of fraudsters, hackers and dishonest businesses in 2010, according to a list of the year's top 10 scams just published by the Better Business Bureau. "With th...

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It's been over three years since credit markets started shaking with the early tremors of the subprime crisis, and two years since that spread into a marketwide collapse. Prosecutors, regulators, Congress and journalists have spent the year uncovering the financial shenanigans that brought the marke...

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The role of the criminal justice system with regard to financial fraud by elite bankers in 2011 is likely to reprise its role last decade -- de facto decriminalization. The Galleon investigation of insider trading at hedge funds will take much of the FBI's and the Department of Justice's (DOJ) focus...

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The research firm CoreLogic has released its official assessment of the monetary toll mortgage fraud has had on the industry in 2010. According to the CoreLogic Fraud Index, fraud losses for this year are estimated to be $11 billion. That figure is actually down from $14 billion in fraud losses...

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An Obama administration task force examining allegations of fraud in the mortgage foreclosure process will deliver its findings next month, two top officials said on Monday. "We expect the results of the investigations will be presented to us next month," Treasury Secretary T...

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August 20, 2009 United States Department of the Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network Re: RIN 1506-AB02 Docket Number TREAS-FinCEn-2009-0002 [Electronically submitted: https://www.regulations.gov] Ladies and Gentlemen: On behalf of 1.2 million members of the National Association of REALTORS®...

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Prosecutors in New York are set to file civil fraud charges against accounting firm Ernst & Young over the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter. The suit, led by Andrew Cuomo, could come as early as this week and may seek to impose fines ...

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NEW YORK (AP, By Tom Hays) -- Three employees at public companies and an executive of an expert-networking firm on Thursday became the latest to be charged in a wide-ranging Wall Street insider trading probe. James Fleishman, 41, of Santa Clara, Calif., the networking executive, was charged with wi...

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The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) said this week that suspicious activity reports (SARs) indicating mortgage loan fraud (MLF) increased seven percent in the first half of 2010. Banks and thrifts filed 35,135 mortgage-related SARs from January to June 2010, up from 32,926 in 2009 dur...

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Of all the city programs that have ever gone wrong in New York, few could compare to CityTime, an automated system meant to streamline employee timekeeping. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has called the project a “disaster,” and perhaps with good reason: the project’s cost has exceeded $600 million,...

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UPDATE: Reuters reports that U.S. financial regulators could be getting some budget soon under a spending bill released on Tuesday. Here's Reuters: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission would get a budget increase of 69 percent, while the Securities and Exchange Commission would get an increa...

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Recent columns on DealBook by Andrew Ross Sorkin and Jesse Eisinger asked why federal prosecutors have not brought any significant cases against senior corporate executives related to the financial meltdown. A partial answer to the question can be found in a decision issued on Friday by the United S...

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Joshua Konigsberg and Louis Fischler dreamed of pennies from heaven in what prosecutors say was a classic pump-and-dump stock scheme. Their timing couldn’t have been worse. The U.S. attorney’s office last week used the duo from Palm Beach County as one example of its beefed-up war on financial frau...

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A northern Indiana man who defrauded real estate developers and churches of more than $2.7 million while presenting himself as a priest associated with the University of Notre Dame has been sentenced to 11 years in prison. Sixty-two-year-old Byron "Father Barney" Canada of Berrien Springs was sente...

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In an effort to bring attention to the problem of investment fraud, federal authorities on Monday highlighted hundreds of cases inwhich defendants accused of financial wrongdoing had been arrested, charged criminally or sentenced to lengthy prison terms. At a news conference headlined by Attorney ...

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Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesAttorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said his new task force had brought cases involving more than $8 billion in estimated losses. To hear Eric H. Holder Jr. tell it, the Justice Department is aggressively cracking down on financial fraud. On Monday in Washington, M...

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Florida may not lead the nation in job growth, high school graduation rate or even college football, but it is tops for one measure: mortgage fraud. MortgageDaily.com gave Florida the highest third quarter score on its Mortgage Fraud Index, which tracks criminal and civil cases across the country. ...

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Mortgage fraud has increased by more than 20 percent since fraud rates reached their lowest point in early 2009, according to CoreLogic. The company says higher risk, high-volume loan programs, including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the government’s Home Affordabl...

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Mortgage fraud has increased by more than 20 percent since fraud rates reached their lowest point in early 2009, according to CoreLogic. The company says higher risk, high-volume loan programs, including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the government’s Home Affordable ...

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Five South Floridians face up to 30 years behind bars after pleading guilty to their roles in a mortgage fraud scheme. Yvette Gonzalez Valdes; her daughter, Jeannine Valdes-Perez; her brother, Joseph Gonzalez; her son-in-law, Victor Perez; and Catherine Maiz are alleged to have submitted false lo...

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Just outside U.S. Attorney Wifredo Ferrer’s office sits a nervous young attorney waiting for a job interview. When he was finally summoned, another fresh-faced lawyer walked through the door at the James Lawrence King Federal Justice Building and took his place on the love seat. There is no recessi...

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By: Carrie Bay DSNews.com Trends are emerging that indicate “fraud for property,” i.e. fraud to attain homeownership, which was once considered to be less dangerous than “fraud for profit,” is returning to the industry. The analysts at Interthinx reached this conclusion after witnessing steep i...

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If it wasn't already blindingly obvious that pervasive fraud was at the heart of the financial crisis and the ensuing foreclosure catastrophe, you would think that the latest news -- that banks have routinely been lying their heads off in the rush to kick homeowners off the properties they fraudulen...

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There are plenty of reasons why the foreclosure fraud crisis sweeping the nation's housing market is an economic disaster. Banks are charging borrowers illegal fees, kicking the wrong people out of their homes and even hiring thugs to illegally break into houses. But the fundamental scam is much wor...

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1718 viewsGet Business Alerts Email Comments 24 The news about the nation's foreclosure scandal has been coming fast and furious, fueled by tales of backdated documents, false affidavits and "rocket dockets" that push families into the street. A former employee with one of the nation's la...

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Authorities have charged two people who they say illegally lived in homes former West Palm Beach police officer Carl Heflin doesn't own but is renting out. Heflin's ex-wife, Cheryl Heflin, 44, and her boyfriend, Anthony Glenn Wilson, 48, both of Riviera Beach, were booked on Tuesday on charges of...

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Four people were arrested and seven companies, four in South Florida, were ordered to stop business operations under what state officials say may be the largest action against Florida's burgeoning time share resale industry. Three state agencies cooperated in a sweep of 67 companies across the st...

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The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) has failed to root out several executives with criminal records whose firms continue to do business with the agency in violation of federal law, according to the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative organization focused on public policy issu...

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American families won a major consumer victory today when the Federal Trade Commission issued a new rule barring debt relief firms from collecting up-front fees from customers before any service is provided. ...

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The FBI reports that equity stripping and property flipping are common. 80% involves collaboration or collusion by industry insiders. ...

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Nationwide, one in every 200 residential loans funded last year, totaling $14 billion, involved fraud, according to First American CoreLogic. States where the highest number of fraudulent loans were found included California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Based on First...

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Godzilla v. the Blob? We all know banks are struggling with loan buy backs, delinquencies, defaults and foreclosure, government interventions including reserve requirements, stress tests, regulators, executive comp restrictions, and pressure to lend. But you may not be aware of the on-going batt...

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According to the Center for Responsible Lending, according to the FBI, Most Mortgage Fraud Comes from Lenders, Not Borrowers. Homeowners and home buyers are responsible for only a small share of mortgage-related fraud -- about 80% is perpetrated by brokers or other professionals. This point and many...

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Miami, FL: Fannie Mae has committed to purchase $5 million in loans originated through an anti-predatory initiative that is designed to relieve homeowners in Miami-Dade who have been victims of abusive lending practices. Under the Miami-Dade Predatory Lending Initiative, borrowers whose credit has b...

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Between them the GSEs have an estimated $300 billion in single-family home loans that are at least 90 days past due, the Wall Street Journal reports. And their teams of auditors are working overtime to weed through the files and pinpoint underwriting missteps or income discrepancies that would warra...

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Bad guys trying to wrangle $1000 to $3000 to help coordinate mortgage loan modifications from distressed homeowners are on the Feds radar screen. With free government approved housing counselors available, one may wonder why anyone would pay for someone to help. Well, first alot of peole dont k...

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Accoridng to Interthinx, fraud the 1st ¼ 2010 was up 4% from last quarter and 11% from last year. Arizona is the highest, CA was number 1 before. Migration from NV to AZ is suspected. NV is now 2nd. Fl 4th. Michigan 5th. Most common frauds include property valuation, employment/income, identity,...

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