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Deposing Employees of Document Mills

Action Date: June 18, 2011
Location: West Palm Beach, FL

Linda Green’s name may appear on two million mortgage assignments, yet she has never been deposed. While there are a few depositions of robo-signers from document mills, in many cases, the document mills seek AND RECEIVE protective orders – arguing that such discovery is burdensome and meant only to harass. If you are a foreclosure defense attorney or a pro se homeowner fighting foreclosure, please send your experiences with this issue for an investigative report on Fraud Digest to szymoniak@mac.com.

As we reported here on April 26th, the Michigan Court of Appeals handed down a ruling that pretty much shuts down non-judicial foreclosures by MERS in Michigan.  As we indicated at the time, this is probably the most sweeping mortgage foreclosure case since Ibanez and has even further reaching consequences than any of the other MERS decisions handed down this year.   (See Residential Funding LLC v. Saurman, Case No. 290248 ).

As we had hoped at the time, this means things are a-changin’ in Michigan.  Since appellate court rulings set precedent in their respective states, lower courts are now required to take their cues from this case when hearing foreclosure suits before them.  Now it is just a matter of getting suits filed on behalf of wronged homeowners. 

Taking the lead in this regard is Justin Grove of the Dailey Law Firm, P.C. in Royal Oak, Michigan.  In addition to filing a class action lawsuit against Bank of America, Justin has now filed more than 15 actions to quiet title.   While these suits will take time, and there are no guarantees, the precedent now set by the Michigan Court of Appeals has given these homeowners a shot at leveling the playing field against the rampant and prolific number of fraudulent foreclosures perpetrated by the big mortgage banks in this state.

Just as important, is that the Dailey Law Firm is getting the word out about the fraud and corruption.  They’re bending more than a few ears, too.  With a weekly radio program airing in two markets, Detroit and Chicago, they are educating homeowners in a vast portion of the Midwest on two of the biggest mega-watt radio stations, WJR and WLS. 

In the past couple of years, almost as many scam law firms have sprung up taking advantage of homeowners, as there are fraudulent mortgage companies.  Unfortunately, an unsuspecting homeowner, desperate for help, may not recognize a scam when they see one.  A page everyone should bookmark and keep for reference for helping to spot a scam is READ THIS FIRST — DON’T GET SCAMMED!  This is also permanently linked on our Links page here on FedUpUSA.

However, let me assure you that Justin Grove and the Dailey Law Firm, P.C. are no scam.  They’ve not only done their homework, but as the Founder and Director of FedUpUSA, I’m going to personally vouch for their integrity.  Much of their work in this area to date has essentially been pro bono.  Filing suits on behalf of homeowners in foreclosure in a non-judicial state with absolutely no case precedent for defense, is a heck of a long shot.  Yet, they did it anyway.  Why?  Because fraud is a crime, but it is not a crime to default on a debt. 

As we’ve said before, this isn’t about anyone getting a free home; this is about the rule of law.  Those rules have been thrown three sheets to the wind in the past 4 years.  Property law has been violated by the banks; rules of accounting have been violated and circumvented (much with the blessing of Congress making special ‘exceptions’); and tax law has been completely thrown out the window, which has resulted in horrific losses of revenue for municipalities.  All of this is FRAUD.  Yet, no one has gone to jail.  Sure, there’ve been fines handed out here and there, but no one has been prosecuted — but many people have lost their homes, and a good portion of those have been the lenders utilizing the aforementioned methods of fraud.

So where does it end?  That’s the question we here at FedUpUSA have been asking since April of 2008.  Perhaps it ends when good people no longer remain silent and good attorneys are willing to stand up and say, ‘You know, there’s no point in my having a job, no point to my profession, unless the rule of law can actually be restored and followed.’  Justin Grove is one of those lawyers.

So, if you’re facing foreclosure, if you’re worried about the chain of title to your home, if you know MERS is part of that chain of title, tune in to The Law Show With Brian Dailey.   Get educated, and if you’re in Michigan and MERS has initiated foreclosure proceedings on your home, then call the Dailey Law firm.: (248) 744-5005 or (866) 66-Lawyer (866-665-2993)

FedUpUSA will be featuring permanent links to The Law Show in our side bar and the Dailey Law Firm, P.C. contact information can be found on our Links page.

Live Video Stream DETROIT Sunday 11:00 AM Eastern:

Live Video Stream CHICAGO Saturday 10:00 AM Central:

And in case you missed it, Justin Grove talked foreclosures and the recent Michigan Appeals Court ruling on their May 8, 2011 show.  Give a listen.

Justin Grove, Esq.

Responding to growing allegations of fraudulent mortgage documents found in Michigan, state Attorney General Bill Schuette on Friday announced his support for a package of bills aiming to make it easier for law enforcement to fight mortgage fraud.

The concerns come from registers of deeds across the state who are finding foreclosure documents with the signature Linda Green on them. Why is that bad?

Because a recent “60 Minutes” story revealed that several people were being paid $10 an hour to sign the name Linda Green on foreclosure-related documents one after another. According to the story, the former Georgia company, Docx, was trying to recreate mortgage reassignment documents that should have been signed when the mortgages were bundled, sold and securitized.

One former employee told “60 Minutes” he had to sign at least 350 documents an hour and probably hit 4,000 signatures a day – none of them his own.

The story sent ripples through county clerks office who began checking documents for Linda Green’s name.

“We had our software company look at Docx documents,” Ottawa County Chief Deputy Register of Deeds Kathy Haiker said. “We do have documents with Linda Green on them. I think we have maybe 35 from 2008 and 2009.”

Jerome Czaja, the chief deputy register of deeds for Kent County estimates they have “hundreds” of Linda Green documents and have submitted samples to the attorney general’s office.

“It’s something that is going to have to work its way through the courts,” he said.

They are among counties across the state who have contacted the attorney general with concerns that thousands of forged mortgage documents were filed during the foreclosure crisis, prompting an investigation.

Attorney General Spokeswoman Joy Yearout said consumers current on their mortgage who find Linda Green’s name on their documents should alert their county register of deeds.

“If there is someone being foreclosed upon, we advise them to check to ensure that the company foreclosing on the home actually holds the note to the property,” she said. “And if they are concerned, we do recommend they consult a private attorney.”

The same goes for people who already went through foreclosure and find Linda Green’s name on their documents.

“People also can file a complaint with the attorney general’s office,” she said.

Kym Spring, coordinator of Foreclosure Response, a consortium of nonprofits and businesses fighting foreclosure in West Michigan, said there’s no real way to know whether the foreclosures with Linda Green’s name are legitimate or not.

“They were rubber stamped,” she said. “They were just signing Linda Green, Linda Green, Linda Green.”

The attorney general’s office is part of an ongoing effort with other states to investigate earlier allegations of “robosigning,” and Yearout said the new allegations are being discussed, too.

The bipartisan package of seven bills were in a senate committee this week, Yearout said, and are likely headed to the senate floor next week. Together they would:

• Make it a felony to violate the notary act when a document affects interest in real estate.
• Increase the penalty for fraud over $20,000, also known as the crime of false pretenses.
• Increase the statute of limitations on crimes related to real property transactions from six to 10 years to give investigators more time.
• And define a specific crime “mortgage fraud,” giving prosecutors a “precise tool.”

Spring welcomed news of the legislation.

“I’m thrilled that there are now some serious efforts to punish those responsible for stealing families’ homes and to help curb and prosecute future abuses,” she said. “At the same time, there really needs to be a requirement that you actually have to have proof that you own someone’s mortgage before you can foreclose on them.”

MILive

Mr. Schuette, while this is a step in the right direction, what we need is legislation requiring any entity initiating foreclosure be required to show proof that they have the right to do so!  Why make this the homeowner’s responsibility to fight fraudulent activity, often times AFTER they’ve been defrauded? 

Of course, if this were to be attempted, I’m sure Michigan would run into the same problem that Arizona is having, where the bankers buy off all the legislators.  So far, there have been two attempts to pass their proposed legislation and each time, one of the sponsoring legislators have withdrawn it after receiving a nice mortgage principal reduction.   See Disappearing Legislation Courtesy of Bankers and Strange Happenings In Arizona State Senate.

Will Michigan actually stand up against the bankers and for its citizens?

Barry Ritholtz’s presentation to the National Association of Attorney General.

NAAG April 2011

How much longer will you stand for these institutions robbing you?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Belvidere, Illinois, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) April 1, 2011 –

The investigation alleges that mortgage lenders such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PHH, Prospect Mortgage, Guaranteed Rate, Home State Bank, Key Financial Services, Platinum Mortgage, Integra Mortgage Inc. and various regional home builders have specific programs in place to compensate real estate brokers for steering business to their mortgage units.

This practice is illegal.

Madigan’s investigators are looking into consistent, widespread and obvious patterns of consumer fraud and manipulation. ??Month after month, these mortgage lenders get a substantial share of the mortgage market due to aggressive and defined kickback programs.

Kickbacks are against both State and Federal law.

It is not uncommon to see materials marketed to real estate agents with clear inducements of steep kickbacks or a split of the mortgage revenues that grossly inflate what consumers should pay for the mortgage or home they are purchasing. ??The Attorney’s office commenced the investigation when they looked into marketing material and a web site created by Integra Mortgage: www.af-usa.com. The promotional material claims that real estate agents can earn a commission by logging onto the web site and registering home loan consumers for mortgages. The mortgage company claims that once the registered loan transaction funds, the real estate broker or other interested taker would be given a portion of the mortgage revenue. When reviewed for accuracy the af-usa.com site noted rates two to three percentage points above fair market rates.

Screw the consumer and don’t disclose it fairly and fully.

Other types of lenders rely on weak State regulatory oversight and legal loopholes to obfuscate revenue kickback schemes. Bank of America, Prospect Mortgage and Wells Fargo appear to be the most egregious at this form of pay-to-play. Common regional examples of tie-in schemes are: First Freedom Financial (Bank of America), a joint venture with Prudential Realty and Personal Mortgage Group/PMG (Wells Fargo), a joint venture with Remax Real Estate. It’s estimated that Bank of America and Wells Fargo by themselves utilize several hundred joint ventures across the U.S.

Nice scheme.  The allegation is that cross-ownership winds up screwing people, because the loan origination winds up being steered by the broker in question, and the tie-in means that the consumer gets hosed through paying higher fees and costs, and those “profits” inure to the benefit of the tied company.

Joint ventures between real estate brokerage firms and banks are structured in many ways and usually work quietly behind the scenes. These ventures are typically negotiated at the upper levels of management between the banks and realty brokerage owners. The mortgage banks often funnel money to joint bank accounts of which the real estate brokerage owners draw off of as desired. ??Companies such as Guaranteed Rate have developed micro revenue kickback schemes for real estate agents specifically wherein the real estate agent can actually own a “share” of the company and is therefore entitled to mortgage company “profits”. Fraud is established from the first transaction because the kickback is not an even proration of Guaranteed Rate’s company revenue but rather based on the scope of the real estate agents referrals.

Wave your hands, scream and shout and then claim not only “too big to fail” but too big to jail as well!  Remember, Wachovia did this with nearly $400 billion in money laundering for Mexican Drug gangs, and our wonderful “press”, including the UK press, ignored the story until the “deferred prosecution agreement” expired, making sure that they’d get away with paying just a tiny fine amounting to less than two tenths of one percent of the amount they moved for these gangsters.

These mortgage bankers clearly understand that kickbacks are against Federal laws yet they continue to cook up elaborate go-arounds to Federal and State statutes. Their hopes are that the regulatory bodies are so ineffective that these kickback schemes will never be discovered.

No, their expectation and reasonable belief is that you won’t do shit about it, and thus these banks literally whizz all over the front hedge of your alleged “office” in which you sit and post wild press releases claiming to be “protecting” consumers.

Consumers have good foundation for this belief. After all, you not only allowed the banks to screw people with subprime lending and failed to assert the State’s 10th Amendment right to stop it, but you then went further and allowed an admitted 150,000 admitted bogus (and likely felonious and perjurous) documents to stand in your state courts and be used to foreclose on homeowners. 

You’ve also allowed apparent wanton and outrageous false claims of ownership of these loans to be made at the time of foreclosure, when there is an incredible amount of evidence that many of these loans were never transferred into the trusts at all.  Since the PSAs and NY Trust Law requires that this be done within (typically) 90 days of the closing date of the trust in question and the default and foreclosure happens months or years later these defects are incurable.  This means that these institutions are standing before your judges and in your courtrooms demanding to evict people for paying a debt that is not owed to the bank in question! 

Literal trillions of dollars worth of paper has been presented as “authentic” to your courtrooms that is in fact not authentic, lacks a documented chain of ownership as required by the PSA and law (because it does not exist) or has been buttressed by fabricated and back-dated paperwork that constitutes a separate and distinct fraud upon your courts.  You have done nothing in the form of prosecuting these institutions for their conduct, even though fraud is typically a felony offense, perjury is typically a felony offense and defilement of the court system destroys the legitimacy of your governments, legal systems, the citizens fundamental liberty interest and the 14th Amendment right to equal protection under the law.

The alleged “AG Settlement negotiation” is a bad joke and yet another fraud upon the public, this one being yours.  There is no criminal prosecution, no requirement to admit guilt and no recovery of the funds and properties stolen through these corrupt practices, most-especially fee-cramming and other acts designed to generate bogus defaults (including but not limited to banks telling homeowners to intentionally default so as to “qualify” for modifications they then fail to deliver.)  To add insult to injury your proclaimed “settlement negotiation” permits balloon notes as “modifications” which we know from experience in the 1930s will simply result in the putative “owner” losing his house in the future – after the bank makes even more money through additional interest, fee and penalty charges.

You have, in fact, a documented decades-long record of not giving a damn about the people at all when it comes to these matters, deferring to these large institutions in virtually every case.  In this regard you join Eric “Placeholder” as a gaggle of so-called “Attorneys General” who appear to have as your highest, best and only calling advocacy for and protection of those large financial institutions that screw the consumer.

The Attorney General’s office is making an effort to change that perception.?Illinois and Federal laws prohibit non-mortgage licenses to earn a fee on the origination of residential mortgages. If you have information that may help the Attorney General’s Investigation or you feel that you’ve been taken advantage of please contact the States Attorney’s Office or the IDFPR at the offices below.

Attorney Genrals Chicago Main Office
100 West Randolph Street
Chicago, IL 60601
(312) 814-3000

IDFPR: Professional Regulation
320 W. Washington
Springfield, IL 62786
Phone: (217) 785-0800

I will not believe a word of your claims until I see banksters locked up in prison for not only this alleged kickback scheme, but also for the admitted violations of the law that have already taken place.

The Market-Ticker

Better late than never, I guess.  60 Minutes on CBS Sunday, April 3, became the first major network program to cover the mortgage fraud perpetrated by the banks that we have been covering for more than 3 years now.