Foreclosure-Gate: Gresham's Law Meets Murphy's Law

10-18-2010 • TheAutomaticEarth.blogspot.com

To repeat: if the chain of title of the note is broken, then the borrower no longer owes any money on the loan. Read that last sentence again, please. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. You read it again? Good: Now you see the can of worms that’s opening up. ======== [..] following the housing collapse of 2007-’10-and-counting, there has been a boatload of foreclosures - and foreclosures on a lot of people who weren’t sloppy bums who skipped out on their mortgage payments, but smart and cautious people who got squeezed by circumstances. These people started contesting their foreclosures and evictions, and so started looking into the chain-of-title issue, and that’s when the paperwork became important. So the chain of title became crucial and the botched paperwork became a nontrivial issue. Now, the banks had hired "foreclosure mills" - law firms that specialized in foreclosures - in order to handle the massive volume of foreclosures and evictions that occurred because of the housing crisis. The foreclosure mills, as one would expect, were the first to spot the broken chain of titles. Well, what do you know, it turns out that these foreclosure mills might have faked and falsified documentation, so as to fraudulently repair the chain-of-title issue, thereby "proving" that the banks had judicial standing to foreclose on delinquent mortgages. These foreclosure mills might have even forged the loan note itself— Wait, why am I hedging? The foreclosure mills did actually, deliberately, and categorically fake and falsify documents, in order to expedite these foreclosures and evictions. Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism, who has been all over this story, put up a price list for this "service" from a company called DocX - yes, a price list for forged documents. Talk about your one-stop shopping!