What these people should have done, and should be doing now, is filing a lawsuit against whichever bank gave them the fraudulent “loan” that they obviously used to buy the house in the first place, since there was no legal “consideration” involved. In fact, every single person in the country who is facing foreclosure should file multi-million dollar lawsuits against these counterfeiting banksters. Enough of them, and even they will go out of business.
They should also demand that the banks produce the original mortgage loan agreement. Tons of these thieving banks bundled up these phony mortgages and sold them to suckers from Heidelberg to Hoboken. If they can’t produce the original contract, they shouldn’t be able to legally foreclose.
The reporter states that the homeowners filed a contents claim while the policy was in force. So what’s wrong with that? Also the reporter implies that the homeowners may have commited arson, but the reporter never tells us exactly what the homeowners are being convicted of. This is the poor quality of reporting that I have seen in my own small town newspaper. Was the reporter just rewriting or transcribing some news release he had been given by the court?
How the federal housing agencies and bailed-out banks are helping shady lawyers make millions by pushing families out of their homes.
By Andy Kroll
August 04, 2010 “Mother Jones” — LATE ONE NIGHT IN February 2009, Ariane Ice sat poring over records on the website of Florida’s Palm Beach County. She’d been at it for weeks, forsaking sleep to sift through thousands of legal documents. She and her husband, Tom, an attorney, ran a boutique foreclosure defense firm called Ice Legal [1]. (Slogan: “Your home is your castle. Defend it.”) Now they were up against one of Florida’s biggest foreclosure law firms [2]: Founded by multimillionaire attorney David J. Stern, it controlled one-fifth of the state’s booming market in foreclosure-related services. Ice had a strong hunch that Stern’s operation was up to something, and that night she found her smoking gun.
It involved something called an “assignment of mortgage,” the document that certifies who owns the property and is thus entitled to foreclose on it. Especially these days, the assignment [3] is key evidence in a foreclosure case: With so many loans having been bought, sold, securitized [4], and traded, establishing who owns the mortgage is hardly a trivial matter. It frequently requires months of sleuthing in order to untangle the web of banks, brokers, and investors, among others. By law, a firm must execute (complete, sign, and notarize) an assignment before attempting to seize somebody’s home.
A Florida notary’s stamp is valid for four years, and its expiration date is visible on the imprint. But here in front of Ice were dozens of assignments notarized with stamps that hadn’t even existed until months—in some cases nearly a year—after the foreclosures were filed. Which meant Stern’s people were foreclosing first and doing their legal paperwork later. In effect, it also meant they were lying to the court—an act that could get a lawyer disbarred or even prosecuted. “There’s no question that it’s pervasive,” says Tom Ice of the backdated documents—nearly two dozen of which were verified by Mother Jones. “We’ve found tons of them.”
This all might seem like a legal technicality, but it’s not. The faster a foreclosure moves, the more difficult it is for a homeowner to fight it—even if the case was filed in error. ”
People like David J. Stern need to be put in jail for life for the fraud they have wreaked on those who weren’t even supposed to be foreclosed on.
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They weren’t sent to prison for burning their own home, they were sent to prison for attempted insurance fraud – a bit of a difference.
What these people should have done, and should be doing now, is filing a lawsuit against whichever bank gave them the fraudulent “loan” that they obviously used to buy the house in the first place, since there was no legal “consideration” involved. In fact, every single person in the country who is facing foreclosure should file multi-million dollar lawsuits against these counterfeiting banksters. Enough of them, and even they will go out of business.
They should also demand that the banks produce the original mortgage loan agreement. Tons of these thieving banks bundled up these phony mortgages and sold them to suckers from Heidelberg to Hoboken. If they can’t produce the original contract, they shouldn’t be able to legally foreclose.
The reporter states that the homeowners filed a contents claim while the policy was in force. So what’s wrong with that? Also the reporter implies that the homeowners may have commited arson, but the reporter never tells us exactly what the homeowners are being convicted of. This is the poor quality of reporting that I have seen in my own small town newspaper. Was the reporter just rewriting or transcribing some news release he had been given by the court?
Good post. Here is a story about “foreclosure mills” that’ll make your hair curl.
motherjones.com/politics/2010/07/david-stern-djsp-foreclosure-fannie-freddie
Fannie and Freddie’s Foreclosure Barons
How the federal housing agencies and bailed-out banks are helping shady lawyers make millions by pushing families out of their homes.
By Andy Kroll
August 04, 2010 “Mother Jones” — LATE ONE NIGHT IN February 2009, Ariane Ice sat poring over records on the website of Florida’s Palm Beach County. She’d been at it for weeks, forsaking sleep to sift through thousands of legal documents. She and her husband, Tom, an attorney, ran a boutique foreclosure defense firm called Ice Legal [1]. (Slogan: “Your home is your castle. Defend it.”) Now they were up against one of Florida’s biggest foreclosure law firms [2]: Founded by multimillionaire attorney David J. Stern, it controlled one-fifth of the state’s booming market in foreclosure-related services. Ice had a strong hunch that Stern’s operation was up to something, and that night she found her smoking gun.
It involved something called an “assignment of mortgage,” the document that certifies who owns the property and is thus entitled to foreclose on it. Especially these days, the assignment [3] is key evidence in a foreclosure case: With so many loans having been bought, sold, securitized [4], and traded, establishing who owns the mortgage is hardly a trivial matter. It frequently requires months of sleuthing in order to untangle the web of banks, brokers, and investors, among others. By law, a firm must execute (complete, sign, and notarize) an assignment before attempting to seize somebody’s home.
A Florida notary’s stamp is valid for four years, and its expiration date is visible on the imprint. But here in front of Ice were dozens of assignments notarized with stamps that hadn’t even existed until months—in some cases nearly a year—after the foreclosures were filed. Which meant Stern’s people were foreclosing first and doing their legal paperwork later. In effect, it also meant they were lying to the court—an act that could get a lawyer disbarred or even prosecuted. “There’s no question that it’s pervasive,” says Tom Ice of the backdated documents—nearly two dozen of which were verified by Mother Jones. “We’ve found tons of them.”
This all might seem like a legal technicality, but it’s not. The faster a foreclosure moves, the more difficult it is for a homeowner to fight it—even if the case was filed in error. ”
People like David J. Stern need to be put in jail for life for the fraud they have wreaked on those who weren’t even supposed to be foreclosed on.