In 2012, when we think Wall Street we think: MF Global theft, JPM criminality, Goldman naked shorting, DTTC failures to deliver, precious metals manipulation, fractional reserve banking, Comex games, HFT trading and endless derivatives. But don’t forget about MERS and mortgage fraud – because according to Vermont Trotter, the National Director of ‘Protect Americas Dream’ it’s all tied together in one giant Ponzi scheme. The worst part is, the bank you pay for your mortgage probably does not even hold the title to your home. It’s a mess – and we are ALL victims.
We know for a fact and the government knows for a fact that if MERS is on your documents, a cloud also exists.
Their “quick fix” might come as simple as accepting a modification, principal reduction or a refi, to cover this all up and creating new paper.
If any of your new docs have MERS or a like, what have you done again?
Statesman-
The ownership of tens of thousands of Central Texas home loans could be in question because of the actions of a national private registry that officials say has sidestepped the filing of proper documents with county clerks, the American-Statesman has learned.
The Mortgage Electronic Registration System was created in the 1990s by 3,000 of the nation’s largest lenders to “streamline the mortgage sale process by using e-commerce to replace paperwork,” according to the company’s website.
In recent years, the Virginia-based registry has exploded across the U.S. as mortgages increasingly were bundled and sold as commodities in rapid churn to investors.
MERS was “PLANNED OUT” and it’s now blowing up in their fraudster faces. It was created in order to hide the fraud they all conspired to keep private (members only) and from the public. This is a veil that needs a good piercing…if any judge would allow.
“This court does not accept the argument that because MERS may be involved with 50 percent of all residential mortgages in the country, that is reason enough for this court to turn a blind eye to the fact that this process does not comply with the law.”
WAPO-
State and federal officials negotiating a settlement with the nation’s biggest banks over shoddy foreclosure practices are hung up on how they should deal with a Reston-based company that has acted as a proxy for financial firms throughout the country for more than a decade.
Some officials refer to the dilemma as the “MERS morass,” referring to Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, whose vast but controversial registry contains roughly 65 million mortgages.
A Year Ago, A Storm of Allegations And Reports Highlighting Robo-Signing And Foreclosure Fraud Swept Across America Causing Major Banks To Halt Foreclosures Nationwide While Congressional, State, And Federal Investigations Were Launched. A Year Later, While Investigations Are Still Ongoing, Regulators Have Failed To Correct The Underlying Issues Behind Foreclosure Fraud And Robo-Signing. The Overwhelming Evidence Presented In This Paper Is That Not Only Were American Homeowners And Borrowers Defrauded In The World’s Greatest Financial Scam, But American’s Wealth And Security Were Placed At Risk. To Date, There Has Been Only One Criminal Conviction Of An Executive Of A Major Mortgage Company And Other Criminal Convictions Have Been Halted. Still, As Shown In This Paper, Foreclosure Fraud And Robo-Signing Continue While Some Courts Address The Issue And Others Ignore The Ramifications Of This Massive Fraud. What Is Now Known Is That These Scams Were Not Unique, But Industry-Wide. The Mortgage-Backed Securities Turned Out To Be Non-Mortgage & Note Backed Empty Trusts. To Conceal This Massive Ponzi Scheme Perpetuated Against Americans, The Nation’s Mortgage Industry Continues To Manufacture, Fabricate, & Destroy Evidence, Despite The Inherent Risks And Ramifications Since Over 90% of Borrowers Don’t Challenge Their Foreclosures.
Nick Timiraos has a great piece in the WSJ about the state of play on foreclosure defense litigation. It quotes Larry Platt, a bank-industry lawyer at K&L Gates (which lost Ibanez). It’s worth pausing for a second to consider what Platt said. Although Platt
concedes that banks may have been sloppy… [he claims that]… “the real assault on the legal system” are efforts by judges and local officials to strip lenders of their rightful ownership and make foreclosures impossible.
Platt’s view, it seems, is that everyone understood the mortgage deal and that the paperwork doesn’t really matter. That’s a very problematic view for any attorney to take, much less one with a background in real estate, secured lending, and securitization. (A less charitable interpretation of Platt’s comments is that the proper outcomes has nothing to do with law. Instead, it’s paperwork and intent be damned, we’re the banks so we should win by right.)
Mistakes happen, of course. And loan servicers like to contend that if errors occur, they are rare and honestly made. But after sifting through the data produced by this investigation, Mr. White disagreed that problems are rare. “In Senate testimony, an executive from Countrywide said its error rate was 1 percent,” Mr. White recalled. “The mortgage servicer industry error rate might be 10 times higher, based on the number of cases we are looking at.”
“There are continued flaws in the process, and they are not merely technical,” Mr. White continued. “Those flaws undermine the integrity of the bankruptcy system. Many homeowners have been harmed, including where the lender has come in and said ‘we want to lift the stay and go back into foreclosure proceedings,’ even though they lacked a sufficient basis to do it.”
The investigation conducted by the OCC and the Fed included a review of just 100 foreclosure files.
Housing Wire-
When mortgage servicers signed consent orders with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve, these companies were required to hire outside firms to conduct “look back” evaluations of questionable foreclosure practices.
But these reviews will not be made public, according to an OCC spokesman.
The head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is warning that flaws may have “infected millions of foreclosures” and questioned whether other regulators’ inquiries into problems at the nation’s mortgage-servicing companies have been thorough enough.
“We do not yet really know the full extent of the problem,” FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said Thursday in written remarks submitted to a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee. “Flawed mortgage-banking processes have potentially infected millions of foreclosures, and the damages to be assessed against these operations could be significant and take years to materialize.”
A Baltimore judge summoned attorneys from a large foreclosure law firm Monday to explain whether signatures on key documents were genuine, part of the fallout from revelations last year that foreclosures nationwide were being processed based on deficient — or fraudulent — paperwork.
Abstract:
Few American homeowners know much about the small, Virginia-based company that has revolutionized the mortgage industry over the past fifteen years. Yet, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. (MERS) is the named mortgagee on nearly two-thirds of all newly originated residential mortgages in the United States. Industry leaders – including Freddy Mac, Ginnie Mae, and a host of private lenders – created MERS in the mid-1990s to help facilitate a burgeoning market in mortgage-backed securities.
At the time MERS was created, a robust and lightly regulated secondary market for mortgage-backed securities seemed like a good idea. The recent subprime mortgage crisis, which has impacted millions of American homeowners and played a key role in a global recession, has done much to challenge that presumption. One unfortunate byproduct of the subprime mortgage crisis has been a dramatic increase in the number of American homeowners facing foreclosure. For many of these homeowners, the MERS system may compound their hardships by effectively masking the identity of the owner of their loans. One of the benefits of MERS membership, according to MERS, is the legal right to foreclose on a defaulting homeowner in MERS’s name rather than in the name of the entity who actually owns the mortgage. This can mean that homeowners have no way of ascertaining the identity of the party with whom they can negotiate their loans.
Several state courts have considered challenges to MERS’s right to initiate foreclosure actions in its own name. MERS claims to have the legal authority to initiate foreclosure proceedings throughout the United States, but not every court has agreed. Some jurisdictions have expressly upheld MERS’s right to foreclose, while some have questioned or limited MERS’s foreclosure rights. Still other courts have reserved judgment, expressing frustration and confusion regarding MERS’s role in an increasing number of foreclosure and bankruptcy proceedings, and the ostensible connection between MERS and the subprime mortgage crisis.
MERS is currently a plaintiff in as many as forty percent of pending foreclosure actions in some locales. This Note argues that foreclosure actions brought in MERS’s name, without joining the real party in interest, are unlawful. Furthermore, this Note reveals how granting standing to MERS in foreclosure actions threatens to undermine the protections for homeowners that foreclosure law has traditionally provided, and violates important property law doctrines that ensure the proper functioning of the recording system and minimize clouds on title.
You can’t sell real estate when you can’t establish that you own it — banks won’t loan money for purchasers to buy the property. That’s because the bank wants to be sure that if it forecloses, it will get good title to the property. (Yes, this issue practically oozes irony.) That’s why banks won’t approve a mortgage for a property if a title insurance company won’t insure its title. And title insurance companies won’t do that if they know the title is clouded.
A few months ago, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued its Ibanez decision, which made it clear that the banks’ foreclosure practices — and indeed, the standard securitization deal — violated longstanding basic Massachusetts real estate law, and thus, many completed Massachusetts foreclosures were invalid. The foreclosing banks, which had either since sold the properties or still “owned” them, had no right to foreclose, and therefore had never owned those properties. So who owns them now? Well, the fact that it’s a question is the very definition of “clouded title.”
One thing that it is important to stress: that the abuses to established real estate transfer and recording processes were not inherent to the securitization model. I’m not a fan of securitization but the sad reality is that no one is prepared to go back to the more costly in terms of equity required, model of on-balance sheet banking (it would result in a shrinkage of credit that every respectable economist would recommend against and hence will never happen). But no one (except the FDIC, which keeps being ignored) is thinking seriously enough about what it would take to make securitization safer.
Everyone, from the bank originators to the investment bank packagers, got hooked on the easy profits, and kept pushing for ways to streamline the process, to both increase their profits and increase the size of the potential market. The biggest problems result from cutting corners, including the failure of the deal sponsors to adhere to their own agreements with investors, that led to this mess. Securitization had existed since the 1970s; MERS, one of the biggest culprits in the uncertainties over title, did not become a serious player until 1999. The widespread failure to convey notes (the borrower IOU) to securitization trusts appears not to have started until sometime between 2002 and 2004.
It’s not rocket science that the problems are clearly visible and this is not going to be easily thrown under the rug as they have done so well thus far.
You can’t sell real estate that doesn’t have a clean bill of health especially with fraudulent documentation.
An important question that should be considered is why hasn’t the National Association of Realtors not issued ANY warnings to their agents about the defects and consequences of selling properties that have been foreclosed and or in short sale? I know for a fact, the NAR’s former president Vickie Cox Golder was made well aware of this in 2010.
As if the country needed more proof of the outlaw behaviors of banks and their agents, The Baltimore Sun‘s Jamie Smith Hopkins reports that 1,000 or more Maryland deeds are likely forgeries, created by a foreclosure mill. A former notary from law firm Shapiro & Burson filed an affidavit with law enforcement and regulators charging that the attorneys’ signatures on the deeds and other important documents were forgeries signed at the express direction of management. The affidavit attached sample signatures.
If the forgery claims are true — and that’s not much of an “if” — the false deeds cloud the properties’ titles, creating a nightmare for the innocent people who bought the homes after they were foreclosed upon.
National Association of Land Title Examiners and Abstractors
7490 Eagle Road
Waite Hill, OH 44094
February 10, 2011
Restoring Integrity to the Land Title Records – A Commentary on MERS
As the faults in the MERS system of mortgage tracking become ever more apparent, so do the consequences begin to take shape. And, as high profile cases of abuse of process rapidly hit the mainstream press, as details continue to emerge, we can see with ever increasing clarity the problems caused by the systematic omission of mortgage
assignments from the public land records.
Earnings at Bank of America, the largest U.S. lender, may suffer materially if using Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems or MERS is found to be invalid, according to a regulatory filing last week. Citigroup and PNC said fines or other penalties may result from investigations into MERS and allegations of faulty foreclosure practices.
“They’re recognizing the writing on the wall, that there are serious problems associated with the basic business model and legal theories of the MERS system,” Christopher L. Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who has written articles on Reston, Virginia-based MERS, said yesterday.
When home buyers and people refinancing their mortgages first see the itemized estimate for all the closing costs and fees, the largest number is often for title insurance.
This moment is often profoundly irritating, mysterious and rushed — just like so much of the home-buying process. Lenders require buyers to have title insurance, but buyers are often not sure who picked the insurance company. And the buyers are so exhausted by the gauntlet they’ve already run that they’re not interested in spending any time learning more about the policies and shopping around for a better one.
Besides, does anyone actually know people who have had to collect on title insurance? It ultimately feels like a tax — an extortionate one at that — and not a protective measure.
But all of the sudden, the importance of title insurance is becoming crystal-clear. In recent weeks, big lenders like GMAC Mortgage, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America have halted many or all of their foreclosure proceedings in the wake of allegations of sloppiness, shortcuts or worse. And a potential nightmare situation has emerged that has spooked not only homeowners but lawyers, title insurance companies and their investors.
What would happen if scores of people who had lost their homes to foreclosure somehow persuaded a judge to overturn the proceedings? Could they somehow win back the rights to their homes, free and clear of any mortgage? But they may not be able to simply move back into their home at that point. Banks, after all, have turned around and sold some of those foreclosed homes to nice young families reaching out for a bit of the American dream. Would they simply be put out on the street? And then what?
The answer to that last question may depend on whether those new homeowners have title insurance, because people who buy a home without a mortgage can choose to go without a policy.
This is what this site is about…”ClOUDED TITLES”! This quote below should have added that it was in 65 Million mortgages not in some. I hope you all read my NO. THERE’S NO LIFE AT MERS…I highly recommend it because it came the heart.
In some cases, mortgages were conveyed using the Reston, Virginia-based Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, designed to cover transfers among system members. Promissory notes also often were endorsed as payable to the bearer to avoid the need for multiple transfers. Both practices have been challenged in court.
Foreclosure Errors Cloud Homeownership With `Blighted Titles’
By Kathleen M. Howley – Oct 1, 2010 12:00 AM ET
U.S. courts are clogged with a record number of foreclosures. Next, they may be jammed with suits contesting property rights as procedural mistakes in those cases cloud titles establishing ownership.
“Defective documentation has created millions of blighted titles that will plague the nation for the next decade,” said Richard Kessler, an attorney in Sarasota, Florida, who conducted a study that found errors in about three-fourths of court filings related to home repossessions.
Attorneys general in at least six states are investigating borrowers’ claims that some of the nation’s largest home lenders and loan servicers are making misstatements in foreclosures. JPMorgan Chase & Co. is asking judges to postpone foreclosure rulings, while Ally Financial Inc. said Sept. 21 its GMAC Mortgage unit would halt evictions. The companies said employees may have completed affidavits without confirming their accuracy.
Such mistakes may allow former owners to challenge the repossession of homes long after the properties are resold, according to Kessler. Ownership questions may not arise until a home is under contract and the potential purchaser applies for title insurance or even decades later as one deed researcher catches errors overlooked by another. A so-called defective title means the person who paid for and moved into a house may not be the legal owner.
‘Nightmare Scenario’
“It’s a nightmare scenario,” said John Vogel, a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. “There are lots of land mines related to title issues that may come to light long after we think we’ve solved the housing problem.”
Almost one-fourth of U.S. home sales in the second quarter involved properties in some stage of mortgage distress, RealtyTrac Inc. said yesterday. In August, lenders took possession of record 95,364 homes and issued foreclosure filings to 338,836 homeowners, or one out of every 381 U.S. households, according to the Irvine, California-based data seller.
The biggest deficiency in foreclosure suits is missing or improperly handled documents, Kessler found in his study of court filings in Florida’s Sarasota County. When home loans are granted, borrowers sign a promissory note outlining payment obligations and a separate mortgage that puts an encumbrance on the property in the lender’s name. If mortgages are resold, both documents must be properly conveyed to prevent competing claims.
Mortgage Bonds
Most of the document errors involved mortgages that had been bundled into securities sold to investors, Kessler said. At the end of the U.S. real estate boom in 2005 and 2006, about 70 percent of the $6.1 trillion in mortgage lending was packaged into bonds, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association in New York.
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