The Florida Foreclosure Fraud Weblog
Where Florida homeowners fight back against foreclosure fraud
The woman who blew the whistle to spark the first major robo-signing fraud indictments is dead. Yves at Naked Capitalism tells the story: Nevada notary Tracy Lawrence, who was due to be sentenced today to up to a year in jail for a single count of misdemeanor fraud, went missing from her sentencing hearing today [...]
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Glarum has the banks running scared. The biggest challenge banks face in today’s foreclosure crisis is that they still haven’t come to grips with the need to tell the truth when they testify. The recent case of Glarum v. LaSalle [PDF] has put even more pressure on the banks to tell the truth in foreclosure [...]
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Foreclosure lawyers may have a duty to set aside foreclosures that were based on robo-signed affidavits, under an ethics opinion recently approved by the Florida Bar. The opinion (below), produced by bar staff in January of this year, responds to a hypothetical question from an unknown lawyer. The Surrogate Signer Hypothetical Under the hypothetical fact-pattern [...]
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Some foreclosure plaintiffs are trying to cash someone else’s checks. Some foreclosure plaintiffs are trying to cash checks that don’t belong to them, and forging evidence along the way to help them do it. And here’s the sneaky trick they use to get it done. Without it, the banking industry couldn’t exist: the Uniform Commercial [...]
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Every once in a while we get a court opinion that spells out exactly what kind of fraud is happening in foreclosure cases, who is responsible, and how they do it. In Re: Wilson is one of those opinions. Read on and prepare to be shocked—unless you’ve read this kind of thing before. An Abuse [...]
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In the wake of the robo-signing scandal that broke last fall, one of the drumbeat-steady excuses you heard from the banks and their PR machines was that, despite what they called “procedural irregularities”, all the foreclosures were justified. No one, they claimed was thrown out on the street by mistake. Well, now we know that [...]
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If you saw Sunday’s 60 Minutes episode about foreclosure fraud perpetrated by DocX, Linda Green, and LPS, fearing the many faces and many signatures of Linda Green as presented by Lynn Szymoniak, then you missed out. If you saw it and don’t believe that our financial instituions have been perpetrating massive, systemic fraud on an [...]
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Did you know that one company is to blame for most, if not all, of the outright fraud found in foreclosures across the country? That one company handles the overwhelming majority of so-called “defaulted” loans? That one company generates—i.e. fabricates—all the paperwork, hires all the lawyers, tracks all the numbers, and pulls all the strings? [...]
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Fountain pens and foreclosures In these days of robo-signers and rocket-dockets, you can easily imagine losing your family home at the stroke of a pen—based on the signature on a perjured affidavit, or the order of a hurried judge—but how often have you heard of a home saved by the stroke of a pen? A [...]
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They also have incredible memories and can ignore the notary rules, too. In every lawsuit, one of the first and most important steps is service of process on the defendant. In a foreclosure action, service of process consists of the Lender’s attorneys informing the homeowner that the property is being foreclosed upon. The courts have [...]
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Chase Follows GMAC, Freezes Foreclosures JP Morgan Chase announced a freeze on mortgage foreclosures in 23 states—including Florida—just a few days after GMAC did the same. Chase took this unusual action because it could not tell whether it had submitted false affidavits or had committed perjury before the foreclosure courts of those states. While announcing [...]
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Reuters reports that GMAC’s recent foreclosure funny business—in Florida and elsewhere—may damage its bond ratings and ultimately hurt its bottom line. Moody’s Investors Service said on Friday it may cut some ratings of GMAC Mortgage as irregularities in its home loan servicing process may result in delayed foreclosures. The rating company’s concern came after GMAC [...]
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It’s nearly impossible to keep up with the firehose of attention the national media are giving the Stephan/GMAC/Ally foreclosure scandals, so I’ll just do a quick summary of some recent articles: The Washington Post: Ally Financial legal issue with foreclosures may affect other mortgage companies Jeffrey Stephan was required to review cases to make sure [...]
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Florida Default Law Group this week sent out a wave of bizarre “Notices” in many of its foreclosure cases, to “withdraw” affidavits Florida Default Law Group filed as evidence in various foreclosure cases. Are Jeffery Stephan Affidavits False? The affidavits in question were signed by a man named Jeffrey Stephan, who claimed in various cases [...]
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Demanding foreclosure accountability Michael Redman and Lisa Epstein didn’t take their foreclosure cases sitting down – they fought back, and fought back hard. Now, in part due to their hard work and tireless advocacy, the Florida Attorney General’s office has launched investigations into four of the largest foreclosure plaintiff’s firms in Florida. Epstein and Redman [...]
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Foreclosure Myths and Facts If you read the newspapers, you’ll know two things about foreclosures in Florida: There’s a huge “backlog” – that’s what the banks call it when they can’t ram their fraudulent cases through the court system to take people’s homes fast enough; and, There’s a huge amount of fraud slipping through the [...]
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Regular readers of this site know that much of the “evidence” banks try to introduce into foreclosure cases is either inadmissible or sometime just flat-out fake. The national news media is picking up on this crisis. The National Law Journal reports on the use of boilerplate affidavits in Florida’s foreclosure cases: Defense lawyers across Florida [...]
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In every foreclosure case, there are at least one, possibly two, points at which a legal notice must be published. In every foreclosure case, the notice of sale must be published in a local newspaper twice before the sale (Fla. Stat. § 45.031 (2)) and in some cases, if the owner of the property cannot be [...]
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Dear Florida judges: You’re under a lot of pressure. We understand. Foreclosure cases are at an all-time high, and still rising – and you have to figure out a way to handle them all. The foreclosure docket threatens to crowd out almost every other civil matter pending before the court – and now that foreclosure [...]
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