ALL-in-ONE, Excellent report by HuffPo’s William Alden on the facts of what went down, when those who work for the people get fired, pushed out for getting a bit too close to exposing the AG’s office.

Is she waiting for the statue of limitations to run it’s course? When there is much more left to expose.

HuffPO-

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Last December, when she was still investigating foreclosure fraud as a top lawyer in the Florida attorney general’s office, June Clarkson gave a PowerPoint presentation to a legal association.

Her presentation amounted to an indictment of Lender Processing Services, or LPS, a company near the center of ongoing state investigations into claims that foreclosures have been rushed en masse through the legal machinery, without proper documentation. She flashed images of paperwork on a screen under the heading “forgeries,” asserting that LPS’ former subsidiary, Docx, had produced phony documents to justify unlawful foreclosures.

The legal association later sent Clarkson a thank-you note, calling her tutorial “invaluable.” Word of her presentation reached New York, where a state Supreme Court judge cited it in a harshly-worded ruling that a bank lacked the right to foreclose on a Brooklyn home.

But the Jacksonville-based LPS was furious …

[HUFFINGTON POST]

MERS, LPS, MERS, LPS everywhere is MERS or LPS…

This involves Tywanna Thomas, who we all know worked for Lender Processing Services’ DocX. We learned a lot from the deposition of Cheryl Denise Thomas aka Tywanna’s Mother who also worked with her.

My San Antonio-

Ezequiel Martinez, a San Antonio real estate investor who helps homeowners avoid foreclosure, recently found himself in the same predicament as his clients.

Rather than simply fight to stop the foreclosure on his Live Oak investment home, Martinez filed suit against his lender, saying the mortgage should be voided because of phony loan documents and because he doesn’t think the bank can prove it owns the mortgage note.

If Martinez wins the case, he just might be done making mortgage payments on the house at 7502 Forest Fern.

“We’re not trying to get a free house,” he explained. “We’re trying to save the house from foreclosure fraud.”

by Paul Kiel ProPublica, Oct. 4, 2011, 11:26 a.m.

Why has the administration’s flagship foreclosure prevention program been so ineffective in helping struggling homeowners get loan modifications and stay in their homes? One reason: The government’s supervision of the program has apparently ranged from nonexistent to weak.

Documents obtained by ProPublica – government audit reports of GMAC, the country’s fifth largest mortgage servicer – provide the first detailed look at the program’s oversight. They show that the company operated with almost no oversight for the program’s first eight months. When auditors did finally conduct a major review more than a year into the program, they found that GMAC had seriously mishandled many loan modifications – miscalculating homeowner income in more than 80 percent of audited cases, for example. Yet GMAC suffered no penalty. GMAC itself said it hasn’t reversed a single foreclosure as a result of a government audit.

The documents also reveal that government auditors signed off on GMAC loan-modification denials that appear to violate the program’s own rules, calling into question the rigor and competence of the reviews.

Some of the auditors’ mistakes are “appalling,” said Diane Thompson of the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group. “It suggests the government isn’t taking the auditing process seriously.”

In a written response to ProPublica questions [1], a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, which runs the program, denied there were serious flaws in its oversight system, calling it “effective and unprecedented in many ways.”

The audits of GMAC, though revealing, give only a limited view into the program, because the Treasury has refused to release the documents for other servicers. For more than a year, ProPublica has sought the audits for ten of the largest program participants through a Freedom of Information Act request. The Treasury provided only GMAC’s audits, because the company consented to their release. ProPublica continues to seek all of the reports.

Abuses of the foreclosure process, in which banks and mortgage servicers cut corners or even created false documents [2] to move trouble borrowers out of their homes, have been extensively documented [3], along with failures by government [4] to regulate the industry. But the lapses revealed in the documents obtained by ProPublica stand out because they occurred within the government’s main effort to prevent foreclosures, the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP.

Oversight Shrouded in Secrecy

For HAMP’s first two years, the government offered very little public detail about its oversight efforts. It was virtually impossible for the public – or even Congress – to know how well the banks and mortgage servicers were complying with the government’s effort to prevent struggling homeowners from losing their homes. Those years were crucial, because that’s when the vast majority of homeowners eligible for a modification – about three million – were evaluated by servicers.

The documents obtained by ProPublica show auditors finding serious problems at a major servicer during that time. Instead of publicly revealing the findings, Treasury chose to privately request that GMAC fix the problems.

“For two years, they’ve known how abysmal servicers were performing and decided to do nothing,” said Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, better known as TARP or the bank bailout, which provided the money for HAMP.

“It demonstrates that if you have a set of rules for which compliance is completely voluntary and no meaningful consequences for those who violate them, having all the audits and reviews in the world are not going to make a bit of difference,” he continued. “It’s why the program has been a colossal failure.”

Treasury continued to release few details about its audits until this June, when it began publishing quarterly reports based on the audits’ results. The public report showed what Treasury called “substantial” problems at four of the ten largest servicers – Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Ocwen – and Treasury for the first time [5] withheld taxpayer subsidies from three of them.

Mortgage servicers that signed up for the program agreed to follow strict guidelines on how to evaluate struggling homeowners seeking a reduced mortgage payment. In exchange, they’d receive taxpayer subsidies. But as we’ve reported extensively, the largest servicers haven’t abided by the guidelines [6]. Homeowners have often been foreclosed on in the midst of review for a modification [7] or been denied due to the servicer’s error. For many homeowners, navigating what was supposed to have been a simple, straightforward program has proven a maddening ordeal [6].

Meanwhile, HAMP has fallen dramatically short of the administration’s initial goals to help three to four million homeowners. So far, fewer than 800,000 homeowners have received a loan modification through HAMP, less than one in four of those who applied [8].

Part of the $700 billion TARP, HAMP launched in early 2009 with a $50 billion budget to encourage loan modifications by paying subsidies to servicers, investors, and homeowners. But in another example of how the program has fallen short, only about $1.6 billion has gone out so far [9].

GMAC said it agreed to release its audits under the program because the company “believes in honoring the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act process” and “elected to be transparent on our work with the [modification] program,” spokeswoman Gina Proia said.

GMAC has changed its parent company’s name to Ally Financial, but its mortgage division is still called GMAC. The government owns a majority stake in Ally, because it rescued the company with TARP funds, but both the company and the Treasury said that didn’t factor into the company’s decision to allow the documents to be released.

ProPublica contacted all nine servicers who objected to the reports’ release. All either declined to comment on why they wanted the audits kept secret or defended keeping them out of the public domain by saying the reports contained confidential information. Collectively, these companies have so far been paid more than $471 million in cash – dubbed “servicer incentive payments” – through the program. They are eligible for hundreds of millions more. The country’s four largest banks – Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup – are also the largest servicers of mortgage loans.

In its written response, Treasury’s spokeswoman said it agreed to withhold the records in part because they could undermine “frank communications between mortgage servicers and compliance examiners” and hurt the program’s effectiveness. The department declined to provide either redacted versions or an index of the documents.

Early Reviews “Useless” and Flawed

Since the program’s beginning, homeowner advocates have wondered where HAMP’s watchdog was [10] and why it was having so little effect. That watchdog is Freddie Mac, tapped by Treasury in February 2009 and working under a contract worth $116 million and rising. The Freddie Mac unit, now staffed with 121 employees and employing about 150 more through contractors, is supposed to regularly audit servicers in the program to make sure they are following the rules. Treasury is ultimately responsible for deciding whether to punish a servicer, but it relies on auditors’ findings to make that decision.

It took several months for the unit to even get off the ground. In August of 2009, Treasury rejected Freddie Mac’s first reviews of servicers as inadequate [10], because they were “inconsistent and incomplete” and its staff was “unqualified,” according to a report by the TARP’s special inspector general. Freddie Mac promised to improve. That process took several more months.

As a result, for the program’s crucial first eight months there effectively was no watchdog. Nationwide, servicers filed to pursue foreclosure on about two million loans during that time.

Treasury disputed the idea that there was no watchdog for those months, saying that auditors had performed “readiness reviews” of servicers as early as the May of 2009, one month after the program began. The documents obtained by ProPublica show, however, that Freddie Mac’s auditing unit, called Making Home Affordable – Compliance (MHA-C), didn’t issue its first report for GMAC until early December, 2009 [11].

That audit was a modest effort that involved collecting a sample of 323 loans handled by GMAC and determining whether they’d been properly reviewed for the program. Because of the delays in starting the reviews, the report was based on a sample of loans that was five months old [12]. Such delays continued into 2010. Another Freddie Mac review, completed at the end of March 2010, was based on GMAC loans selected in October of the previous year [13].

The delays make those reviews “largely useless to homeowners,” said Thompson of the National Consumer Law Center. If a homeowner lost the house to foreclosure in July, it wouldn’t help to have an auditor notice that several months later, she explained.

The December 2009 audit notes that GMAC might have already foreclosed on loans auditors had flagged as potentially mishandled, but didn’t order remedial steps. It only requests that GMAC not take “further action.” [14]

GMAC said it had never reversed a foreclosure action as a result of a HAMP audit. ProPublica asked the other nine servicers who objected to the audits’ release the same question. American Home Mortgage Servicing, the only other servicer that answered the question, said it had also never reversed a foreclosure action due to a HAMP audit.

American Home handles about 384,000 loans [15], putting it among the ten largest servicers in the program.

A Treasury spokeswoman said that auditors have reviewed more than 50,000 loan files, but did not directly answer whether a servicer had ever reversed a foreclosure action because of a HAMP audit. Where auditors have found problems, she wrote, the department has “required servicers to take steps to tighten controls” and “re-evaluate any borrowers who may have been potentially impacted.”

In early 2010, around the same time that the auditing unit was issuing its first reports, auditors complained that servicers’ lack of responsiveness to their requests was hampering their efforts. Getting the right documents from servicers was “a cumbersome process,” the head of Freddie Mac’s audit team, Paul Heran, said in February 2010 at a mortgage industry conference. It seemed, he added, that servicers often relegated responding to the auditors to low-level staff who didn’t understand the requests. Another manager in the unit, Vic O’Laughlen, said servicers tended to respond with “at best fifty percent of what we’re expecting to see.”

However uncooperative the banks and mortgage services may have been, Freddie Mac’s auditing reports contain errors that call into question their reliability.

Every few months, the auditors examine a sample of the servicer’s loans that have been denied a HAMP modification to check whether the denials are legitimate. In each GMAC report reviewed by ProPublica, auditors found that the servicer had, with very few exceptions, given the homeowner fair and appropriate consideration. But among the justifications listed in the audits are some that violate the program’s rules or simply don’t make sense.

For instance, the December 2009 review says that 35 of the 247 loans auditors reviewed were denied because the homeowner was “less than 60 days delinquent.” [16] In the report, auditors said that was the right decision in all but one case. But being less than 60 days delinquent is never on its own a legitimate reason for a servicer to deny a modification, according to the program rules. Homeowners are eligible for a modification even if they’re current on their loans, as long as they can show they’re in imminent danger of defaulting.

Another example: Auditors agreed that GMAC had correctly denied a homeowner because of a failure to sign a trial modification offer by Dec. 31, 2012, HAMP’s end date [17]. That makes no sense, because the review took place in 2009. Treasury’s spokeswoman said this was a typo and that the homeowner was denied for a completely different reason.

There are several other examples in later reports of auditors signing off on denial reasons that have no apparent basis in the program’s rules. For instance, auditors cited “grandfathered foreclosure” [18] as a legitimate reason for some denials. The spokeswoman said such loans had been in the foreclosure process before GMAC signed up for the program, but the program rules explicitly stated at the time that such loans were eligible.

When ProPublica asked GMAC if it had denied homeowners loan modifications for these reasons, the company said it couldn’t comment because auditors, not GMAC, had generated those descriptions of why homeowners had been denied. In some cases, Proia said, the descriptions were simply wrong: GMAC had never denied homeowners simply because they weren’t 60 days delinquent.

But Treasury defended the questionable denials, and in so doing raised even more questions. For instance, the spokeswoman said HAMP “does not specifically require servicers to evaluate loans that are less than 60 days delinquent.” But Treasury’s official guidance to servicers said such borrowers “must be screened.”

“It makes you wonder if the Treasury even knows the rules for their own program,” said National Consumer Law Center’s Thompson.

A Congressionally-appointed panel, among others, has pointed to a fundamental flaw in the way the oversight was carried out: Auditors have had no direct contact with homeowners. The program has been dogged by servicers’ inadequate document systems. Borrowers have long reported [6] faxing and mailing the same documents over and over, because servicers kept losing them. Servicers have denied about a quarter of all modification applications due to an alleged lack of documentation [19]. Because HAMP’s auditors do not contact borrowers, there’s no way for them to ascertain if a denial for inadequate documentation was correct.

In response to this criticism from the Congressional Oversight Panel for the TARP last December [20], Treasury said auditors did not contact homeowners to avoid giving them added stress. The panel rejected that reason, saying that contacting borrowers was “critical to assessing the accuracy of a servicer’s determination.”

Instead of talking with borrowers, auditors conduct on-site reviews of mortgage servicing companies, Treasury’s spokeswoman said in her written response to ProPublica. Treasury believes that focusing “on servicer processes and internal controls is the most effective deployment of our compliance efforts,” she wrote.

Detailed Audit Shows Serious Problems

It wasn’t until July 2010, sixteen months after HAMP launched, that the unit performed their first major audit of GMAC. The review included a visit to GMAC’s offices and a detailed review of a sample of loans.

The report enumerated various rule violations, including in how GMAC evaluated homeowners for modifications. GMAC’s practice was to begin the foreclosure process too quickly [21]: The program required the servicer to give the homeowner 30 days to respond to a trial modification offer, but GMAC’s procedure was to wait only 20.

GMAC’s Proia said no homeowners were “negatively impacted by this issue.”

Auditors also found that GMAC was regularly miscalculating the homeowner’s income. In a review of 25 loan files of homeowners who had received a modification, the auditors said 21, or 84 percent, involved a miscalculation of income [22]. Since the borrower’s income is a key factor in whether the homeowner qualifies for a modification, the high error rate raises obvious questions about whether GMAC was accurately evaluating homeowners’ applications.

Asked about this the frequent income miscalculations, GMAC’s Proia said that the “issue was identified in the early stages of the program,” that calculating the borrower’s income is a “complicated process,” and that GMAC has improved since the mid-2010 review – an assertion backed up by recent audit results published by the Treasury.

The July 2010 review also found that GMAC had been aware of certain problems such as “incorrect income and expense calculations,” [23] but had not fixed them. Proia said the company does its best to fix problems when it becomes aware of them.

Penalties: Late and Weak

Typical of the Treasury’s oversight of the program, GMAC was never penalized for any of the rule violations. For the first two years of the program, Treasury officials publicly threatened servicers with the possibility of penalties, but instead followed a cooperative approach [24]. When auditors found problems, servicers were asked to fix them.

The documents illustrate that back and forth. In response to the auditors’ findings, GMAC was required to develop an “action plan.” GMAC refused to provide the action plan to ProPublica and recommended seeking it and other similar documents by filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the Treasury.

Treasury has sent mixed messages about its ability to penalize banks over the course of the program [24], threatening “monetary penalties and sanctions” in late 2009, and then later saying it lacked the power to enforce such penalties. Treasury finally departed from its cooperative approach this June, when it withheld incentive payments [5] from three of the top ten servicers. (GMAC was not among them.) The companies would not receive the public subsidies for completing modifications until they made certain changes. The companies were cited for some of the same problems for which auditors had criticized GMAC, such as regularly miscalculating the borrower’s income. JPMorgan Chase, for instance, had erred in estimating income in about a third of the homeowner loan files reviewed.

The punishment hasn’t had much sting to it. Two of the three companies had their incentive payments restored when Treasury’s most recent report [25] declared they’d improved. Only Chase and Bank of America, the country’s largest servicer, would continue to have their incentives withheld, Treasury said.

But while those incentives have slowed, they have not stopped, according to Treasury’s monthly TARP reports [26]. Since June, when Treasury first announced it would be withholding incentives, Bank of America has received $2.5 million in taxpayer incentives. While that’s a steep reduction from the roughly $7.5 million it had been receiving monthly, the bank is supposed to be receiving nothing. Chase received $404,000 during that same time.

Treasury responded that it has programs to encourage modifications on both first and second mortgages, and that the payments Bank of America and Chase received were related to second mortgages. “Current system limitations” meant the Treasury couldn’t withhold these payments, according to the Treasury spokeswoman. Treasury is working to fix the problem, she said.

By MICHELLE CONLIN, AP Business Writers –

Mortgage industry employees are still signing documents they haven’t read and using fake signatures more than eight months after big banks and mortgage companies promised to stop the illegal practices that led to a nationwide halt of home foreclosures.

County officials in at least three states say they have received thousands of mortgage documents with questionable signatures since last fall, suggesting that the practices, known collectively as “robo-signing,” remain widespread in the industry.

The documents have come from several companies that process mortgage paperwork, and have been filed on behalf of several major banks. One name, “Linda Green,” was signed almost two dozen different ways.

Lenders say they are working with regulators to fix the problem but cannot explain why it has persisted.

Last fall, the nation’s largest banks and mortgage lenders, including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and an arm of Goldman Sachs, suspended foreclosures while they investigated how corners were cut to keep pace with the crush of foreclosure paperwork.

Critics say the new findings point to a systemic problem with the paperwork involved in home mortgages and titles. And they say it shows that banks and mortgage processors haven’t acted aggressively enough to put an end to widespread document fraud in the mortgage industry.

“Robo-signing is not even close to over,” says Curtis Hertel, the recorder of deeds in Ingham County, Mich., which includes Lansing. “It’s still an epidemic.”

In Essex County, Mass., the office that handles property deeds has received almost 1,300 documents since October with the signature of “Linda Green,” but in 22 different handwriting styles and with many different titles.

Linda Green worked for a company called DocX that processed mortgage paperwork and was shut down in the spring of 2010. County officials say they believe Green hasn’t worked in the industry since. Why her signature remains in use is not clear.

“My office is a crime scene,” says John O’Brien, the registrar of deeds in Essex County, which is north of Boston and includes the city of Salem.

In Guilford County, N.C., the office that records deeds says it received 456 documents with suspect signatures from Oct. 1, 2010, through June 30. The documents, mortgage assignments and certificates of satisfaction, transfer loans from one bank to another or certify a loan has been paid off.

Suspect signatures on the paperwork include 290 signed by Bryan Bly and 155 by Crystal Moore. In the mortgage investigations last fall, both admitted signing their names to mortgage documents without having read them. Neither was charged with a crime.

And in Michigan, a fraud investigator who works on behalf of homeowners says he has uncovered documents filed this year bearing the purported signature of Marshall Isaacs, an attorney with foreclosure law firm Orlans Associates. Isaacs’ name did not come up in last year’s investigations, but county officials across Michigan believe his name is being robo-signed.

O’Brien caused a stir in June at a national convention of county clerks by presenting his findings and encouraging his counterparts to investigate continued robo-signing.

The nation’s foreclosure machine almost came to a standstill when the nation’s largest banks suspended foreclosures last fall. Part of the problem, banks contended, was that foreclosures became so rampant in 2009 and 2010 that they were overwhelmed with paperwork.

The banks reviewed thousands of foreclosure filings, and where they found problems, they submitted new paperwork to courts handling the cases, with signatures they said were valid. The banks slowly started to resume foreclosures this winter and spring.

The 14 biggest U.S. banks reached a settlement with federal regulators in April in which they promised to clean up their mistakes and pay restitution to homeowners who had been wrongly foreclosed upon. The full amount of the settlement has not been determined. But it will not involve independent mortgage processing firms, the companies that some banks use to handle and file paperwork for mortgages.

So far, no individuals, lenders or paperwork processors have been charged with a crime over the robo-signed signatures found on documents last year. Critics such as April Charney, a Florida homeowner and defense lawyer, called the settlement a farce because no real punishment was meted out, making it easy for lenders and mortgage processors to continue the practice of robo-signing.

Robo-signing refers to a variety of practices. It can mean a qualified executive in the mortgage industry signs a mortgage affidavit document without verifying the information. It can mean someone forges an executive’s signature, or a lower-level employee signs his or her own name with a fake title. It can mean failing to comply with notary procedures. In all of these cases, robo-signing involves people signing documents and swearing to their accuracy without verifying any of the information.

Most of the tainted mortgage documents in question last fall were related to homes in foreclosure. But much of the suspect paperwork that has been filed since then is for refinancing or for new purchases by people who are in good standing in the eyes of the bank. In addition, foreclosures are down 30 percent this year from last. Home sales have also fallen. So the new suspect documents come at a time when much less paperwork is streaming through the nation’s mortgage machinery.

None of the almost 1,300 suspect Linda Green-signed documents from O’Brien’s office, for example, involve foreclosures. And Jeff Thigpen, the register of deeds in North Carolina’s Guilford County, says fewer than 40 of the 456 suspect documents filed to his office since October involved foreclosures.

Banks and their partner firms file mortgage documents with county deeds offices to prove that there are no liens on a property, that the bank owns a mortgage or that a bank filing for foreclosure has the authority to do so.

The signature of a qualified bank or mortgage official on these legal documents is supposed to guarantee that this information is accurate. The paper trail ensures a legal chain of title on a property and has been the backbone of U.S. property ownership for more than 300 years.

The county officials say the problem could be even worse than what they’re reporting. That’s because they are working off lists of known robo-signed names, such as Linda Green and Crystal Moore, that were identified during the investigation that began last fall. Officials suspect that other names on documents they have received since then are also robo-signed.

It is a federal crime to sign someone else’s name to a legal document. It is also illegal to sign your name to an affidavit if you have not verified the information you’re swearing to. Both are punishable by prison.

In Michigan, the attorney general took the rare step in June of filing criminal subpoenas to out-of-state mortgage processing companies after 23 county registers of deeds filed a criminal complaint with his office over robo-signed documents they say they have received. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office has said it is conducting a banking probe that could lead to criminal charges against financial executives. The attorneys general of Delaware, California and Illinois are conducting their own probes.

The legal issues are grave, deeds officials across the country say. At worst, legal experts say, the document debacle has opened the property system to legal liability well beyond the nation’s foreclosure crisis. So someone buying a home and trying to obtain title insurance might be delayed or denied if robo-signed documents turn up in the property’s history. That’s because forged signatures call into question who owns mortgages and the properties they are attached to.

“The banks have completely screwed up property records,” says L. Randall Wray, an economics professor and senior scholar at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

In the Massachusetts case, The Associated Press tried to reach Linda Green, whose name was purportedly signed 1,300 times since October. The AP, using a phone number provided by lawyers who have been investigating the documents since last year, reached a person who said she was Linda Green, but not the Linda Green involved in the mortgage investigation.

In the Michigan case, a lawyer for the Orlans Associates law firm, where Isaacs works, denies that Isaacs or the firm has done anything wrong. “People have signatures that change,” says Terry Cramer, general counsel for the firm. “We do not engage in ‘robo-signing’ at Orlans.”

To combat the stream of suspect filings, O’Brien and Jeff Thigpen, the register of deeds in North Carolina’s Guilford County, stopped accepting questionable paperwork June 7. They say they had no choice after complaining to federal and state authorities for months without getting anywhere.

Since then, O’Brien has received nine documents from Bank of America purportedly signed by Linda Burton, another name on authorities’ list of known robo-signers. For years, his office has regularly received documents signed with Burton’s name but written in such vastly different handwriting that two forensic investigators say it’s highly unlikely it all came from the same person.

O’Brien returned the nine Burton documents to Bank of America in mid-June. He told the bank he would not file them unless the bank signed an affidavit certifying the signature and accepting responsibility if the title was called into question down the road. Instead, Bank of America sent new documents with new signatures and new notaries.

A Bank of America spokesman says Burton is an assistant vice president with a subsidiary, ReconTrust. That company handles mortgage paperwork processing for Bank of America.

“She signed the documents on behalf of the bank,” spokesman Richard Simon says. The bank says providing the affidavit O’Brien asked for would have been costly and time-consuming. Instead, Simon says Bank of America sent a new set of documents “signed by an authorized associate who Mr. O’Brien wasn’t challenging.”

The bank didn’t respond to questions about why Burton’s name has been signed in different ways or why her signature appeared on documents that investigators in at least two states have deemed invalid.

Several attempts by the AP to reach Burton at ReconTrust were unsuccessful.

O’Brien says the bank’s actions show “consciousness of guilt.” Earlier this year, he hired Marie McDonnell, a mortgage fraud investigator and forensic document analyst, to verify his suspicions about Burton’s and other names on suspect paperwork.

She compared valid copies of Burton’s signature with the documents O’Brien had received in 2008, 2009 and 2010 and found that Burton’s name was fraudulently signed on hundreds of documents.

Most of the documents reviewed by McDonnell were mortgage discharges, which are issued when a home changes hands or is refinanced by a new lender and are supposed to confirm that the previous mortgage has been paid off. Bank of America declined comment on McDonnell’s findings.

In Michigan, recorder of deeds Hertel and his counterparts in 23 other counties found numerous suspect signatures on documents filed since the beginning of the year.

In June, their findings led the Michigan attorney general to issue criminal subpoenas to several firms that process mortgages for banks, including Lender Processing Services, the parent company of DocX, where Linda Green worked. On July 6, the CEO of that company, which is also under investigation by the Florida Attorney General’s office, resigned, citing health reasons.

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Signatures on documents used in foreclosure cases under review

The Sun News-

BLOOMBERG:

The Michigan attorney general’s office subpoenaed three mortgage processors including Lender Processing Services as part of a state probe of robo-signing.

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said his office serviced Lender Processing, Fidelity National Financial Inc. (FNF) and CT Corporation System with investigative subpoenas as affiliates of DocX, a mortgage service support provider. The attorney general said he is seeking information about documents signed by DocX employees as “Linda Green.”

The subpoenas are part of a criminal investigation into questionable mortgage documentation filed with Michigan’s Register of Deeds offices, Schuette’s said in a statement today. The subpoenas were approved by the state court in Lansing June 13 and require responses by June 30, Schuette said.

Continue reading [BLOOMBERG]

PRESS RELEASE:

Schuette Issues Subpoenas in Criminal Probe of Mortgage Processors

Contact:  John Sellek or Joy Yearout 517-373-8060
Agency: Attorney General

LANSING– Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette today announced that he has issued criminal investigative subpoenas against national mortgage servicing support providers in an expansion of his office’s investigation into questionable mortgage documentation filed with Michigan’s Register of Deeds offices during the current foreclosure crisis.

“Allegations of forged mortgage documents are very serious and require a thorough investigation,” said Schuette.  “I will continue to work closely with federal and local authorities to find answers on behalf of Michigan homeowners.”

The Attorney General is empowered to pursue criminal investigative subpoenas under the Code of Criminal Procedure (MCL 767A.2(2)).  Schuette’s office has filed criminal investigative subpoenas against DocX, which provides mortgage support services, including creating, processing or recording mortgage assignments or other mortgage documentation.  In addition to DocX, the following companies affiliated with DocX were served with investigative subpoenas by Schuette’s office:

·         Lender Processing Services, Inc.;

·         Fidelity National Financial, Inc.; and

·         CT Corporation System.

Schuette’s office has requested documents regarding the mortgage processing companies’ operations in relation to foreclosure and/or bankruptcy-related document processing.  The subpoenas were approved by the 54B District Court in Ingham County on Monday, June 13, 2011, and the information must be provided to the Attorney General’s Office on or before June 30, 2011.

In April 2011, Schuette launched an investigation after county officials across the state reported that they suspected Assignment of Mortgage documents filed in their offices may have been forged.  A recent “60 Minutes” news broadcast had shown that the name “Linda Green” was signed to thousands of mortgage-related documents nationwide, but with many different variations in handwriting.  County officials in Michigan reviewed their files and found similar documents, thus raising questions about the authenticity of the documents filed.

Schuette is investigating whether certain mortgage processing companies permitted such robosigning of legal documents filed in connection with Michigan foreclosures.  Apart from the question of whether falsified signatures were used, robosigning may also involve individuals signing affidavits to signify that mortgage documentation was properly prepared without ever conducting a proper review of the documents.  Although Michigan is a non-judicial foreclosure state, Schuette is reviewing whether robosigned documents may have been filed with courts in limited cases.

Schuette urges any current or former employees of mortgage servicers or processing companies with knowledge of unlawful practices related to mortgage servicing or the execution of documents in Michigan to call the Attorney General’s Corporate Oversight Division at (517) 373-1160 (517) 373-1160 .

Schuette is also continuing to work with fellow attorneys general in a national workgroup examining mortgage lending practices, including the robosigning issue and consumer protection concerns affecting homeowners nationwide.

Schuette reminds Michigan homeowners that citizens do not need to pay to speak with their lender or servicer or to obtain outside assistance with foreclosure issues.  Free local assistance with foreclosure issues can be found by calling the Michigan State Housing Development Authority at (866) 946-7432 (866) 946-7432.

-30

source: http://www.michigan.gov

By Lynn Szymoniak, ESQ.

False Statements

American Home Mortgage Servicing
DocX, LLC
Lender Processing Services
Sand Canyon Corporation
Wells Fargo Bank, N.A.

Action Date: June 12, 2011
Location: Phoenix, AZ

On June 10, 2011, the U.S. Bankruptcy Appellate Panel of the Ninth Circuit issued an important and lengthy analysis of standing and real-party-in-interest issues in a foreclosure case in Veal v. American Home Mortgage Servicing, BAP No. AZ-10-1055-MkKiJu.

GSF Mortgage Corporation was the original lender in this case. Wells Fargo Bank, as Trustee for Option One Mortgage Loan Trust 2006-3, and its servicer, American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc., sought to set aside the automatic bankruptcy stay in order to foreclose on the Veals. The note was not endorsed to Wells Fargo or to the trust. As part of their efforts to establish standing, and real-party-in-interest status, Wells Fargo and American Home Mortgage Servicing, the servicer for the Trust, filed a mortgage assignment.

The Assignment was prepared by Docx, LLC in Alpharetta, GA, the document mill made famous by Fraud Digest, then by 60 Minutes, Reuters, The Washington Post, the New York Times, Huffington Post, Firedoglake, Naked Capitalism, Foreclosure Hamlet, 4closure Fraud, Stop Foreclosure Fraud, the Wall Street Journal, and many others. While Docx is now closed, its documents live on in courts and recorders offices across the country.

The Veal Assignment was signed by Tywanna Thomas and Cheryl Thomas who claimed to be officers of Sand Canyon Corporation formerly known as Option One Mortgage. From deposition testimony of Cheryl Thomas, it is known that both Cheryl and Tywanna Thomas were actually employees of Lender Processing Services, the company that owned Docx. There are many different versions of the Tywanna Thomas signature because, as we now know, the employees in Alpharetta forged each other’s names on witnessed and notarized documents.

The Assignment was signed (by someone) on November 10, 2009, but a line on the Assignment right underneath the legal description of the property states:
“Assignment Effective Date 10/13/2009.”

The closing date of the trust was October 27, 2006, almost three years prior to the Assignment effective date. Investors were told the trust would obtain actual Assignments to the Trust of the mortgages pooled in that trust by the closing date.

Dale Sugimoto, the president of Sand Canyon, said in a sworn affidavit on March 18, 2009, filed in the Ron Wilson bankruptcy case in the Eastern District of Louisiana, Case No. 10-51328, Document 52-3, that Sand Canyon does not own any residential mortgages and has no servicing rights.

To summarize:

1. Cheryl Thomas and Tywanna Thomas were not officers of Sand Canyon, as represented on the Assignment. Someone other than Tywanna Thomas and Cheryl Thomas often forged their names.

2. The Veal loan was not transferred to the Option One trust effective October 13, 2009, as represented on the Assignment.

3. Sand Canyon did not own the Veal mortgage and, therefore, had no authority to assign the mortgage to the Option One Trust. The Latin phrase – Nemo dat quod non habit – best covers this situation. Translation: one cannot give what one does not have.

Investors in this Option One trust, the Bankruptcy Judge in the Veal case, bankruptcy trustees with similar documents, homeowners and their lawyers, the SEC, and the Justice Department must all demand answers (and reparations) from the Trustee, the document custodian, the servicer and Lender Processing Servicing.

Mortgage Fraud

Lender Processing Services/DocX

Action Date: June 8, 2011
Location: Guilford County, NC

An Open Letter to Jeff Thigpen, Guilford County, NC Register of Deeds and John O’Brien, Southern Essex County, Massachusetts Register of Deeds

Dear Jeff and John,

I want to remind you exactly who you stood up for yesterday. I get emails – hundreds each week – from sick, unemployed, elderly people, young families and veterans who are frightened, too broke to afford a lawyer, and being foreclosed by banks that are using badly forged documents to claim their homes.

This week, judges across the country will grant foreclosures – based on mortgage assignments signed by Linda Green, Korell Harp, Tywanna Thomas and others like them who were following orders from the banks.

A Miami judge said to me “I know who you are – you’re that woman who thinks she can stop a foreclosure because the notary signed her name upside-down.”

The hostility in the courtrooms is really amazing. I expect I will get thrown in jail in Miami some day for contempt for even suggesting a bank committed fraud.

Most days, it is my ragtag, never-say-die colleagues in foreclosure (wonderful people) and some non-bank-owned journalists who are willing to speak the truth about the bank documents used to steal homes.

You two were the first two public officials in the country who were willing to do more than “investigate” – who actually took action.

You will never know how much your act gave me encouragement when I needed it most.

Thank you from me, and on behalf of thousands of people across the country who doubted any public official would ever stand up, speak the truth and take action.

With admiration,

Lynn Szymoniak

No..It’s not Tina Fey!

Zero Hedge–

Steven Soraya, who had a loan amounting to $980,500.00 with Wells Fargo, which was released on July 3, 2007 and which just so happens was signed by Robosigner extraordinaire, the one, the only, the infamous Linda Green. Ergo our question: did miss Palin just procure a property to which there is no legitimate title, and which, therefore, may not have been legitimately sold to her? Oh yes, MERS is of course involved too.

Continue to ZH to witness the docx…

From previous post below:

NC Reg. of Deeds Thigpen Releases Approx. 4,500 DocX Signature Spread Sheet

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BLOOMBERG-

The signatures of the same names on more than 4,500 documents handled by Lender Processing Services Inc. (LPS) for real estate valued at $624.8 million varied enough to raise doubts about their validity, Jeff Thigpen, register of deeds in Guilford County, North Carolina, told reporters today in Greensboro.

Check out the link to documents below…

NC Reg. of Deeds Thigpen Releases Approx. 4,500 DocX Signature Spread Sheet

At the hearing, after watching the 60 Minutes segment on DocX forged documents, they seem to appear in shock…  “This is Compelling,” Rep. Knollenberg said.

Michigan Messenger-

LANSING — The growing controversy over allegedly fraudulent foreclosure documents will receive a hearing Wednesday in the state House Banking Committee. The controversy has also prompted some public officials to call for repeal of Michigan’s foreclosure by advertisement process, and instead adopt a judicial foreclosure act.

MFI-MIAMI-

Several months ago, the major banks sounded the all clear signal regarding robo-signing in non-judicial foreclosure states, namely Michigan and Massachusetts.  It appears those claims of non-exist robo-signing were either greatly exaggerated or were overly optimistic.

MFI-Miami has uncovered evidence of forged documents drafted and signed by attorneys and employees at Orlans Associates at their corporate offices in Troy, Michigan.   These  fraudulent documents will impact tens of thousands of foreclosures done by Ally Financial, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan-Chase, Fannie Mae and others in Michigan and Massachusetts over the past five years and makes the investigation being done by Ingham County Register of Deeds, Curtis Hertel, Jr. and Oakland County Clerk Bill Bullard into the robo-signing of Linda Green at the now defunct DocX look like a kindergarten production of the movie, The Firm.

According to Form 8-K filed on April 13, 2011:

LPS entered into a consent order (the “Order”) with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision (collectively, the “banking agencies”) in connection with their review of matters relating to the mortgage servicing industry, including the services provided to mortgage servicers by their DocX and Default Solutions operations.

LPS will engage an independent third party to conduct a risk assessment and review of our default management businesses and the document execution services we provided to Servicers from January 1, 2008 through December 31, 2010.

LPS neither admits any fault or liability.

Consent Order for LPS (47 KB PDF)

Question: Wonder what the regulators thought of when they watched 60 Minutes broadcast of LPS, DOCX and Servicer fraud on national tv with over 12 million viewers?

Just see what the number one popular post has been on this site since the airing of it or do a simple google search like 60 Minutes Docx or 60 Minutes LPS and you’ll see SFF is the first site that comes up. We’re no fools and believe me the entire globe has tuned in, including the regulators.

Shahien Nasiripour– Huffington Post

The nation’s 14 largest mortgage firms must compensate wronged homeowners after federal bank regulators determined the companies broke federal and state laws by improperly foreclosing on an incalculable number of distressed borrowers. The agencies announced such penalties Wednesday, the first in what is likely to be a series of enforcement actions targeting the country’s biggest banks and costing them billions.

Lenders like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial systematically broke rules and took shortcuts when foreclosing on homeowners last year, the regulators said. Their three-month review launched after documents and videos of so-called robo-signers — people who signed thousands of foreclosure documents a day without reading them or knowing what was in them — surfaced, leading the biggest banks to halt home seizures.

Bank examiners found the firms employed practices that “failed to conform to state legal requirements.” In other words, they broke the law.

Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil

The banks didn’t admit or deny regulators’ findings, according to the orders.

From Fed Press Release:

The Federal Reserve will closely monitor progress at the firms in addressing these matters and will take additional enforcement actions as needed.

In addition to the actions against the banking organizations, the Federal Reserve on Wednesday announced formal enforcement actions against Lender Processing Services, Inc. (LPS), a domestic provider of default-management services and other services related to foreclosures, and against MERSCORP, Inc. (MERS), which provides services related to tracking and registering residential mortgage ownership and servicing, acts as mortgagee of record on behalf of lenders and servicers, and initiates foreclosure actions. These actions address significant compliance failures and unsafe and unsound practices at LPS and its subsidiaries, and at MERS and its subsidiary. The action requires LPS to address deficient practices related primarily to the document execution services that LPS, through its subsidiaries DocX, LLC, and LPS Default Solutions, Inc., provided to servicers in connection with foreclosures. MERS is required to address significant weaknesses in, among other things, oversight, management supervision, and corporate governance. The LPS action is being taken jointly with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Office of Thrift Supervision, while the MERS action is being taken jointly with those agencies and the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

The Federal Reserve Board based its enforcement actions on the findings of the interagency reviews of the major mortgage servicers, LPS, and MERS. A summary of the findings from the reviews of the mortgage servicers is available in the Interagency Review of Foreclosure Policies and Practices, which is simultaneously being released by the Federal Reserve Board and the other agencies.

• Interagency Review of Foreclosure Policies and Practices (461 KB PDF)
• Consent Order for Bank of America Corp. (34 KB PDF)
• Consent Order for Citigroup Inc. and CitiFinancial Credit Co. (28 KB PDF)
• Consent Order for Ally Financial, Inc., ResCap, GMAC Mortgage, and Ally Bank (87 KB PDF)
• Consent Order for HSBC North America Holdings, Inc. and HSBC Finance Corp. (76 KB PDF)
• Consent Order for JPMorgan Chase & Co. and EMC Mtge. (39 KB PDF)
• Consent Order for MetLife, Inc. (25 KB PDF)
• Consent Order for PNC Financial Svs. Group, Inc. (25 KB PDF)
• Consent Order for SunTrust Banks, Inc., SunTrust Bank, and SunTrust Mortgage (76 KB PDF)
• Consent Order for U.S. Bancorp (25 KB PDF)
• Consent Order for Wells Fargo & Co. (25 KB PDF)
• Consent Order for LPS (47 KB PDF)
• Consent Order for MERS (48 KB PDF)

Special Thanks to Lynn’s attorney Mark Cullen!

Via Palm Beach Post

At a brief hearing Tuesday, Circuit Judge Jack Cook dismissed the case after finding that the note for the loan was not attached to the original foreclosure complaint. Deutsche Bank filed the foreclosure case in 2008, shortly after a dispute with her lender, Option One Mortgage, over her adjustable rate mortgage.

An attorney for Deutche Bank declined to comment on whether the bank would refile the foreclosure case. However, if the bank does so, it will have to comply with new, court-ordered guidelines that require lenders to verify the truthfulness of the documents. Those rules were not in effect in 2008 when Deutsche Bank filed to foreclose on Szymoniak’s home.

Click link below in case you missed 60 Minutes…

EXPLOSIVE VIDEO | CBS 60 MINUTES: Lynn Szymoniak ESQ, LPS, DOCx, FDIC Sheila Bair, Robo-Signing, Linda Green, Tywanna Thomas, Chris Pendley

Akerman Senterfitt & Eidson, P.A.
American Home Mortgage Servicing
Docx, LLC
Florida Default Law Group
Law Offices of David Stern
Law Offices of Marshall Watson
Lender Processing Services, Inc.
Shapiro & Fishman Law Firm

Action Date: April 4, 2011
Location: West Palm Beach, FL

On April 3, 2011, CBS’ 60 MINUTES aired a segment showing massive fraud by banks and mortgage-backed trusts in foreclosures. The segment focused on one particular document mill, Docx, LLC, owned by Lender Processing Services, Inc., a company that works for over 51 banks. One former employee confessed to forging 4,000 documents each day.

What mortgage servicing companies used the Docx forged documents in hundreds of thousands of cases? The major mortgage servicer involved was American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc. in Coppell, TX. Other mortgage servicers that used forged documents from LPS include Saxon Mortgage Services in Fort Worth, TX and Select Portfolio Servicing in Salt Lake city, Utah.

What bank/trustees most often used the Docx forged documents in foreclosures? Deutsche Bank National Trust Company, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Bank of America were the top five users of these forged documents, but other banks were also involved.

American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc. knew about the forgeries, but never disclosed to courts or homeowners their widespread use of forged documents.

In thousands of cases across the country, Deutsche Bank National Trust Company continues to push these documents upon the courts as proof that they own mortgages and have the right to foreclose, despite overwhelming evidence and even admissions of forgeries.

These servicing companies and bank need to begin the process of admissions, disclosures and reparations.

What law firms pushed and continue to push these fraudulent documents upon Courts and homeowners? In Florida, the firms that used these documents and continue to use these documents are: Law Offices of David Stern; Florida Default Law Group; Law Offices of Marshall Watson; Shapiro & Fishman Law Firm and Akerman, Senterfitt & Eidson, P.A. Lawyers who used and continue to use these Docx forgeries in court should, at a minimum, lose the right to practice law.

The government focus must be on protecting the rights of homeowners and shareholders and the court system and holding the banks and securities companies accountable.

Coming this Sunday, April 3, 2011 DOCx, LPS, Lynn Szymoniak (Fraud Digest), Chris P.  who signed over 4,000 documents a day!

As more and more Americans face mortgage foreclosure, banks’ crucial ownership documents for the properties are often unclear and are sometimes even fraudulent – a condition that’s causing lawsuits and hampering an already weak housing market. Scott Pelley reports. Robert Anderson and Daniel Ruetenik are the producers.

[Source: 60 MINUTES]

[CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO LINK]

Mortgage Fraud

Freddie Mac
Marshall C. Watson Law Firm

Action Date: March 12, 2011
Location: Ft. Lauderdale, FL

The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (“Freddie Mac”) announced on March 11, 2011, that it is taking its foreclosure cases away from the Marshall C. Watson Law Firm. The Watson firm, based in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, was one of the firms most often used by Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and mortgage-backed trusts to foreclose in Florida. The Watson Firm came under the scrutiny of the Economic Crimes Division of the Florida Attorney General for improper loan documentation and foreclosure practices.

In over ten thousand Florida foreclosure cases, the Watson firm used mortgage assignments signed by the firm’s own employees to prove that their clients owned the mortgages. In most of these cases, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and mortgage-backed trusts were claiming to own the mortgages. Fannie, Freddie and the trusts lost or never obtained the mortgage assignments needed to prove ownership.

In these cases, two associate lawyers in the Watson firm, Patricia Arango and Caryn Graham, signed the Assignments to the trusts so that the foreclosures could proceed. When Arango and Graham signed these mortgage assignments, they did not disclose that they were lawyers in the Watson Firm. Instead, Arango and Graham signed as officers of Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc.

In the last three years, Arango and Graham signed as officers of the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., as Nominee for the following lenders on over 10,000 documents used in Florida foreclosures:

• Aegis Wholesale Corporation;
• America Imperial Mortgage Business, Inc.;
• American Bancorp Mortgage Corp.;
• American Home Mortgage;
• America’s Wholesale Lender;
• BNC Mortgage, Inc.;
• Century 21 Mortgage;
• Countrywide Bank, FSB;
• Countrywide Home Loans, Inc.;
• CTX Mortgage Company, LLC;
• Gateway Funding Diversified Mortgage Services;
• Decision One Mortgage Company, LLC;
• E-Loan, Inc.;
• First Choice Funding Group;
• First Magnus Financial Corporation;
• Flagstar Bank, FSB;
• Greenpoint Mortgage Funding;
• Guaranteed Mortgage Bankers;
• HomeAmerica Mortgage Corp.;
• Interstate Home Loan Center, Inc.;
• Ivanhoe Financial, Inc.;
• KB Home Mortgage Company;
• MFC Mortgage Inc. of FL;
• Quicken Loans, Inc.;
• Suntrust Mortgage, Inc.; and
• Universal American Mortgage Company, LLC.

On the majority of these documents, the date of the alleged transaction is falsely stated. The documents were so poorly prepared that in many cases, the new owner is shown to have acquired the mortgage months and even years AFTER the foreclosure cases were filed by those new mortgage owners.

The Watson Firm was also the law firm that most frequently used mortgage assignments prepared by Docx, LLC. The assignments from Docx, LLC include thousands of documents with forged signatures of Linda Green, Tywanna Thomas and Korell Harp, as well as dozens of documents where the lenders were identified as “Bogus Assignee” and “A Bad Bene.” These Docx-prepared assignments also falsely stated the dates of the alleged transfers, and even the authority of the signers to sign on behalf of Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc.

Despite the well-documented problems with foreclosure cases brought by the Watson Firm, Fannie Mae has not removed the firm from its list of approved law firms. Fannie Mae removed Florida firm Ben-Ezra & Katz in February, 2011, and required the firm to transfer over 15,000 files. Fannie also removed The Law Offices of David J. Stern in Plantation, Florida. That firm announced that it would stop doing all foreclosure work as of March 31, 2011.

No criminal charges have been filed in any case involving forged or fraudulent loan documents used by banks and mortgage lenders to foreclose.

While courts have been critical of such documents and have added requirements to civil procedure rules so that law firms can be sanctioned for using such documents, no sanction has ever included any criminal charges.

[Read Complaint Below]

PRESS RELEASES

Saxena White P.A. Files Securities Fraud Class Action Against Lender Processing Services, Inc.

Boca Raton, January 12, 2011

Boca Raton, FL, January 12, 2011:  In recent months, various government investigations and media reports on mortgage service companies have exposed an industry that increasingly relied on deceptive and fraudulent business practices, including the use of so-called “robo-signers” that falsified mortgage ownership documents.  Lender Processing Services, Inc. (“LPS” or the “Company”), a mortgage servicer based in Jacksonville, Florida, is one of the companies facing government scrutiny.

In connection with the Florida Attorney General’s investigation into the Company, former Florida AG Bill McCollum has indicated that LPS and other similar companies have produced “numerous documents in foreclosure cases that appear to be fabricated.”  As a result of the rampant use of these and other unscrupulous business practices, investors have suffered millions of dollars in losses.

Saxena White P.A. has filed a class action lawsuit for an institutional investor in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida on behalf of all investors who purchased LPS securities during the period between July 29, 2009 and October 4, 2010, inclusive (the “Class Period”), seeking to recover damages caused by defendants’ violations of the federal securities laws.

The complaint alleges that, throughout the Class Period, defendants failed to disclose material adverse facts about the Company’s true financial condition, business and prospects. Specifically, the complaint alleges that defendants failed to disclose: (i) that the Company had engaged in improper and deceptive business practices; (ii) that a subsidiary of LPS, Docx, had been falsifying mortgage documents through the use of “robo-signers”; (iii) that the Company had engaged in improper fee sharing arrangements with foreclosure law firms, including the use of undisclosed contractual arrangements for impermissible legal fee splitting, which are camouflaged as various types of fees; and (iv) that as a result of the Company’s deceptive business practices, LPS reported materially false and misleading financial results.

On October 4, 2010, after continued media reports and various government investigations calling into question LPS’s default-related services that it provides to mortgage lenders, the market price of LPS stock fell $2.72, or 8.6% per share, to close at $28.76 per share. The price of LPS stock fell another $1.45, or 5.04%, on October 5, 2010, to close at $27.31 per share, on unusually heavy trading volume.

You may obtain a copy of the complaint and join the class action at www.saxenawhite.com.  If you purchased LPS stock between July 29, 2009 and October 4, 2010, you may contact Joe White or Greg Stone at Saxena White P.A. to discuss your rights and interests:

Joseph E. White, III                       Greg Stone
jwhite@saxenawhite.com                gstone@saxenawhite.com

Saxena White P.A.
2424 North Federal Highway, Suite 257
Boca Raton, FL 33431
Tel: (561) 394-3399
Fax: (561) 394-3382
www.saxenawhite.com

If you purchased LPS shares during the Class Period and wish to apply to be the lead plaintiff in this action, a motion on your behalf must be filed with the Court no later than January 24, 2011.  You may contact Saxena White P.A. to discuss your rights regarding the appointment of lead plaintiff and your interest in the class action.  Please note that you may also retain counsel of your choice and need not take any action at this time to be a class member.

Saxena White P.A., which has offices in Boca Raton, Boston and Montana, specializes in prosecuting securities fraud and complex class actions on behalf of institutions and individuals.  Currently serving as lead counsel in numerous securities fraud class actions nationwide, the firm has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of injured investors and is active in major litigation pending in federal and state courts throughout the United States.

Continue to complaint below…

[ipaper docId=46766055 access_key=key-22a2tb1bsjcggfh2scys height=600 width=600 /]

DALLAS–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Goldfarb Branham LLP is investigating whether certain officers and directors of Lender Processing Services, Inc. (NYSE: LPS) violated state and federal securities laws due to statements the company made about its home foreclosure procedures. Concerned LPS shareholders are urged to contact securities attorney Hamilton Lindley at 877-583-2855 or hlindley@goldfarbbranham.com about their rights and remedies.

“According to a class action complaint, LPS failed to disclose that its DocX subsidiary used ‘robo signers’ to falsify documents and that LPS engaged in improper fee shifting with foreclosure attorneys to hide these deceptive practices,” said securities lawyer Hamilton Lindley. “After a company press release commented on these allegations, LPS stock price plummeted 13 percent.”

Goldfarb Branham LLP lawyers have significant experience representing shareholders and whistleblowers in securities lawsuits nationwide. The firm may be retained without financial obligation or cost to its clients. Lender Processing Services investors who purchased stock before or between July 29, 2009 and October 4, 2010, and continue to hold their shares, should contact the firm at hlindley@goldfarbbranham.com or 877-583-2855 to learn about their rights.

Goldfarb Branham LLPHamilton Lindley, 214-583-2233877-583-2855 Toll Free214-583-2234 Facsimile hlindley@goldfarbbranham.com

Source: Goldfarb Branham LLP