Fla Bar News: Study — Only 16% of Foreclosure Documents Were Valid

SHAM TRANSACTIONS: VIRTUALLY NONE OF THE SECURITIZED MORTGAGES WERE SECURITIZED

If anyone is still wondering whether the issue of illegal foreclosures has reached mainstream in judicial circles, take a look at the article in this week’s Florida Bar News by Gary Blankenship entitled “Who Owns the Note? Paperwork problems still plague foreclosure actions.”

Quoting from several of the known players in the world of calling out the banks on their illegal actions, Blankenship reports that the issues includes, fraud, forgery, fabrication and just plain negligence. 4clourefruad.com’s Michael Redman is quoted extensively. Redman’s site is now publishing a feature called “Fraud of the week” where 10 cases are selected randomly and analyzed to show the most egregious defects in the paperwork. One problem highlighted by Redman was a case where two “wet ink” signatures were submitted by two different companies, each claiming they had the original on the same case, same borrower and same property. Redman’s group concluded that the signatures were actually copies digitized and printed to make them look like originals.

The article is very long for any article appearing in the Florida Bar News, which gives some indication of how well accepted the “spurious” claims of yesteryear are now being accepted as true, correct and only part of the problem. The big question, as we have repeatedly shown, is that even if we eliminate all current foreclosures the larger problem of title on around 100 million transactions nationwide are going to still rear their heads as transactions stumble forward. Any chain of title with a securitized mortgage in it is going to be met with problems of clouded, defective or unmarketable title.

The title companies are watching this closely and they are nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Their agents frequently were the closing agents and their reports on title were used to close tens of millions of transactions with defective title. The presence of MERS is clearly one of the biggest headaches inasmuch as none of the assumptions behind the creation and business model of MERS were correct. The value of a MERS deed or any deed in a chain of title where MERS was involved automatically means there is a title problem.