Washington state AG: all mortgage trustees stop questionable foreclosures, FORGED DOCUMENTS

OLYMPIA, Wash. — Washington state Attorney General Rob McKenna Wednesday asked all mortgage trustees in the state to immediately stop what he called questionable foreclosures.

The attorney general’s office has received at least a dozen complaints and investigations have revealed that many foreclosure trustees are not following the law, McKenna said. Investigators have found faulty chains of title, failure to provide required disclosures, and inaccurate — if not forged — documents.

“We’re seeing the same name being signed with very different handwriting from document to document, which of course suggests that some of the foreclosure trustee employees are signing documents on behalf of other people instead of those individuals signing the documents themselves,” McKenna said.

The problems are not limited to big lenders, but include small trustees as well, said McKenna, along with investigators from the Department of Financial Institutions and Washington State Housing Finance Commission.

KIRO 7 Consumer Investigators contacted many of the trustees named by the attorney general’s office Wednesday. Those willing to comment said they were in full compliance, welcomed the added scrutiny and said it’s the other trustees being investigated, not them.

McKenna contradicted that, though, when asked if all trustees doing foreclosure business in Washington state are currently under investigation.

KIRO Reporter Amy Clancy: “Do you believe that all of them are guilty of some wrongdoing?”

McKenna: “We believe that it is likely that most of them, if not all of them, have been cutting corners.”

Posted in bubble, Corruption, Eviction, securities fraud |