Click here for Prof. William K. Black, "The Great American Bank Robbery," Hammer Forum.

June 23, 2009:

      Click here for Neil Garfield, "Securitization in a Nutshell," Living Lies.

September 19, 2009:

      Click here for Ellen Brown, "Landmark Decision Promises Massive Relief for Homeowners and Trouble for Banks," Web of Debt.
      The Kansas Supreme Court in Landmark Nat'l Bank v. Kesler, Case No. 98,489 (S.C. of Kansas, 31 August 2009), ruled that, where MERS is named in the mortgage as the original mortgagee's nominee, but there is no assignment of the mortgage Note to MERS, MERS has no interest in the mortgaged property and therefore cannot either foreclose or assign the right to do so. 
      In such situations, MERS is a mere "straw man" for the original mortgagee.  "The real parties in interest concealed behind
      MERS have been made so faceless . . . that there is now no party with standing to foreclose."  

December 10, 2009:

      Click here for Ice Legal, P.A., "Deposition of Jeffrey Stephan [GMAC Robosigner]" in GMAC Mortgage v. Neu, Case No. 50 2008
      CA 040805xxxx MB (Circuit Court of the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit in and for Palm Beach County, Florida).

April 7, 2010:

      Click here for Christine Springer, "Class Action Certification Granted in Illinois for FDCPA Violation: Codilis & Associates," Stop
      Foreclosure Fraud.

April 14, 2009:

     Click here for Joe Eaton, "The Appraisal Bubble: in Run Up to Real Estate Bust, Lenders Pushed Appraisers to Inflate Values,"
     The Center for Public Integrity (14 April 2009).

March 12, 2010:

      Click here for Alec Foege, "'Foreclosure Mill' Law firms Cash in Big on Homeowner Woes," Housing Watch.

April 29, 2010:

     Click here for Law Office of Kenneth Eric Trent, "Deposition of Ms. Shannon Smith [David J. Stern's Notary]" in Citimortgage, Inc. v. Brown, Case No. CACE 08-011097 (Circuit Court of the 17th Judicial Circuit in and for Broward County, Florida).

June 1, 2010:

      Click here for

August 1, 2010:

      Click here for Lynn E. Szymoniak, "The Most Reviled Law Firm in Florida and the 'Unowned Mortgage Loans' Scheme,"
      Fraud Digest.

September 23, 2010:

      Click here for Ariana Eunjung Cha and Brady Dennis, "Amid Mountain of Paperwork, Shortcuts and Forgeries Mar Foreclosure Process," The Washington Post.

September 24, 2010:

      Click here for Ariana Eunjung Cha,"Robo-Signer Linda Green Signed Documents that Let to Thousand of Foreclosures: Linda Green's Changing Signature," The Washington Post.

      Click here for Attorney General Lisa Madigan, "Attorney General Madigan Demans Meeting with Mortgage Lender at Center of Foreclosure Controversy: GMAC Suspected of Submitting False Documents in Foreclosure Cases," Office of the Attorney General of Illinois.

September 26, 2010:

      Click here for Lorraine Woellert and Dakin Campbell, "JPMorgan Based Foreclosures on Faulty Documents, Lawyers Claim,"
      Bloomberg News.

      Click here for Gretchen Morgenson, "Raters Ignored Proof of Unsafe Loans, Panel is Told," The New York Times. 
      "D. Keith Johnson, former president of Clayton Holdings, a company that analyzed mortgage pools for the Wall Street firms that sold them, told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that half of the mortgages he sampled from the beginning of 2006 through June 2007 failed to meet crucial quality benchmarks that banks had promised to investors."  Standard & Poor's, Fitch Rating, and Moody's Investors Service all ignored him.  "It was against their business interests to be too critical of Wall Street."

September 27, 2010:

     Click here for Yves Smith, "FUBAR Mortgage Behavior: Florida Banks Destroyed Notes; Others Never Transferred Them."  Naked Capitalism.

September 30, 2010:

      Click here for Attorney General Edmund G. Brown, Jr., "Demand that JP Morgan Chase Halt Foreclosures in California," State of California, Department of Justice.

      Click here for Attorney General Richard Cordray, "Ohio Asks Courts to Review GMAC Foreclosures," Reuters.

      Click here for Ariana Eunjung Cha, "7 Major Lenders Ordered to Review Foreclosure Procedures," The Washington Post.

      Click here for Representative Alan Grayson, "Fraud Factories: Rep. Alan Grayson Explains the Foreclosure Fraud Crisis,"  YouTube.

October 1, 2010:

      Click here for Scot Paltrow and Jonathan Stempel, "GMAC Showed 'Bad Faith' in Maine Foreclosure: Judge," Reuters.

      Click here for "Attorney General Asks CT Courts to Freeze Home Foreclosures 60 Days Because of Defective Docs,"
      Office of the Attorney General of Connecticut.

      Click here for Christopher Lewis Peterson, "Two Faces: Demystifying the Mortgage Electronic Registration System's Land Title Theory," Social Science Research Network.

      Click here for Jonathan Stempel and Maria Aspan, "BofA Suspends Foreclosures, States Eye JP Morgan," Reuters.

October 2, 2010:

      Click here for David Streitfeld, "Company Stops Insuring Titles in Chase Foreclosures," The New York Times.

October 3, 2010:

      Click here for Karl Denninger, "See, I Told You So(Mass-Document Forgery?)," The Capital Markets.  "The cure for the mortgage documents puts the loan out of eligibility for the trust.  In order to cure, on a current basis, they have to argue that the loan goes retroactively back into the trust.  This is the cure that the banks have been unwilling to do, because it is a big problem for the MBS.  So instead they forge and fabricate documents."

      Click here for Gretchen Morgenson, "Flawed Paperwork Aggravates a Foreclosure Crisis," The New York Times.

October 4, 2010:

      Click here for Peter J. Henning, "The Gathering Storm over Foreclosures," The New York Times.

      Click here for Greg Hunter, "Could Foreclosure Fraud Cause Another Banking Meltdown?," USA Watchdog.  "  Congressman Grayson says, 'It appears that on a widespread and probably pervasive basis they [the banks] did not take the steps necessary to own the Note . . . which means that in 45 out of the 50 states they lack the legal right to foreclose . . . .  So they have simply created a system where servicers hire foreclosure-mill law firms whose business it is to forge documents showing or purporting to show they have a legal right to foreclose." 

October 5, 2010:

      Click here for the Attorney General of Texas, "Attorney General Abbott Calls for a Halt on Foreclosures While Loan Services Review Their Business Practices,"  Office of the Attorney General.      .

October 6: 2010:

      Click here for Margaret Cronin Fisk, "JPMorgan, Bank of America Face 'Hydra' of Foreclosure Probes," Bloomberg News.

      Click here for Ben Schott, "Robo-Signers: Nickname for Those Who Processed Large Numbers of Foreclosure Affidavits,"
      The New York Times.  

October 7, 2010:

      Click here for Brady Dennis and Ariana Eunjung Cha, "In Foreclosure Controversy, Problems Run Deeper than Flawed Paperwork," The Washington Post.

      Click here for "Miller Requests Mortgage Companies to Halt Iowa Foreclosures," Office of the Attorney General of Iowa.

      Click here for Michael Hudson, "Boiler Rooms, Foreclosure Mills: the Story of America's Mortgage Industry," The Center for Public Integrity.
   
October 8, 2010:

      Click here for Ron Lieber, "After Foreclosure, a Focus on Title Insurance," The New York Times.

      Click here for Dan Levine, "Homeowners May Gain Ground in Foreclosure Fights," IBN Live.

      Click here for "Motion to Compel" in Robinson v. Countrywide Home Loans, Inc. (Case 2:08-CV-01563, W.D. Penn.), alleging use of non-lawyers as attorneys by foreclosure mill and seeking to reverse illegal foreclosures.  

      Click here for Mike Konczal, "Foreclosure Fraud for Dummies, 1: the Chains and the Stakes," Wordpress.
      "[M]ortgage originators never sent the notes to the depositors . . . . It is a problem of systemic risk."

      Click here for Ellen Brown, "Shock Therapy for Wall Street: JP Morgan Suspends 56,000 Foreclosures, GMAC, and BOA Many More," The Daily Mail.

October 10, 2010:

      Click here for Zachary A. Goldfarb, "Government Had Been Warned for Months about Troubles in Mortgage Servicer Industry,"
      The Washington Post.

October 11, 2010:

      Click here for Alain Sherter, "Why Rampant Foreclosure Fraud Was Inevitable," CBS BNet.  "What the [Wall Street] Journal blithely dismisses as 'sloppy work" by bank employees is nothing of the sort.  Rather, such chicanery is a principle of design . . . ."

      Click here for Mike Konczal, "Foreclosure Fraud for Dummies, 2: What is a Note,and Why Is It So Important?," Wordpress.
      "[T]he note is the evidence of the debt.  If it isn't properly in the trust then there isn't clear evidence of the debt existing.  And
      it can't be a matter of 'let's go find it now!'  REMIC law, which governs the securitization, is really specific here.  The
      securitization can't get new assets after 90 days without a tax penalty, and it can't get defaulted assets at all without a
      major tax penalty . . . .  This is because these parts of the mortgage-backed security were supposed to be passive entities.
      They are supposed to take in money through mortgage payments on one end and pay it out to bondholders on the other end, hence their exemption from lots of taxes; the tradeoff is that they can't be de facto managers of assets, and that's what 'going to find the notes' would require."

      Click here for Mike Konczal, "Foreclosure Fraud for Dummies, 3: Why Are Servicers So Bad at Their Job?," Wordpress.
      "[T]he first rule of mortgage lending is that you don't foreclose . . . .  In the past, that was never at issue becuase the loan was always in the hands of someone acting as a fiduciary . . . .  [N]ow . . . loans are not in the hands of a portfolio lender but in a security where structurally nobody is acting as the fiduciary."

      Click here for Mike Konczal, "Foreclosure Fraud for Dummies, 4: How Could This Explode into a Systemic Crisis?,"

      Click here for Liz Rappaport, "Wall Street Pay: A Record $144 Billion," The Wall Street Journal. "Pay on Wall Street is on pace to break a record high for a second consecutive year."

October 12, 2010:

      Click here for Barry Ritholz, "Why Foreclosure Fraud Is so Dangerous to Our System of Property Rights," Business Insider.
     
      Click here for Peter G. Miller, "The Real Foreclosure Crisis: Who Owns the Mortgages?," The Huffington Post.

      Click here for Diana Olick, "Foreclosure Fruad: It's Worse Than You Think." CNBC.
      The mortgages are not properly assigned.  "The mortgage is still owed, but there's going to be a problem figuring out who actually holds the mortgage, and they would be the ones bringing the foreclosure. You have a trust that has been getting payments from borrowers for years that it has no right to receive. So you might see borrowers suing the trusts saying give me my money back, you're stealing my money. You're going to then have trusts that don't have any assets that have been issuing securities that say they're backed by a whole bunch of assets, and you're going to have investors suing the trustees for failing to inspect the collateral files, which the trustees say they're going to do, and you're going to have trustees suing the securitization sponsors for violating their representations and warrantees about  what they were transferring."

October 13, 2010:

      Click here for Kurt McKee, "A Bombshell Has Dropped in Mortgage Land," Real Estate Mortgage News.    

      Click here for Judge Hazouri, "Opinion in Alejandre v. Deutsche Bank, Case No. 4DO9-2280," District Court of Appeal of the State of Florida, Fourth District.   Requires trial where defendant alleges a genuine question of material fact.

      Click here for David McLaughlin, "Florida's 30-Second Foreclosure Dash Hits Wall of Fraud Claims," The Washington Post.

      Click here for the "Joint Statement of the Mortgage Foreclosure Multistate Group" issued by the National Association of Attorneys General.

      Click here for "Ohio Joins Multi-State Investigation of Foreclosure Problems," Office of the Attorney General of Ohio.

      Click here for Barry Harrell, "Texas Joins National Foreclosure Investigation," American-Statesman.

October 14, 2010:

      Click here for Paul Krugman, "The Mortgage Morass," The New York Times.  "This is very, very bad."

      Click here for Alain Sherter, "Banks Are Stealing Homes: Why Won't Obama Stop It?" BNet.  "You don't make up documents if you have the real ones, and if you don't have the real ones, you are really stuck.  So the idea that the banks con somehow magically find documentatin the clearly don't have and get back to life as usual is a complete non-starter."

      Click here for Joshua Rosner, "Why 'Blank Name' Matters and Trustee Obligations," GrahamFisher.

      Click here for William D. Cohan, "How Wall Street Hid Its Mortgage Mess," The New York Times.

      Click here for David Reilly, "Foreclosure Mess Could Be Taxing for Mortgage Investors," The Wall Street Journal.

October 15, 2010:

      Click here for Ben Hallman et al., "Reform Roundup: What the Foreclosure Lawyers Did," The Center for Public Integrity.

      Click here for John Carney, Senior Editor, CNBC News, "Sorry Folks, the Put-Back Apocalypse Ain't Gonna Happen," CNBC
      News.  "[T]he politicians will not let the financial stability of the largest banks in the nation be threatened by contractual rights.  Not when there's an easy fix available that won't cost taxpayers a dime.  Here's what is going to happen: Congress will pass a law called something like 'The Financial Modernization and Stability Act of 2010' that will retroactively grant mort-
      gage pools the rights in the underlying mortgages that people are worried about.  All the screwed up paperwork, lost notes, unassigned security interests will be forgiven by a legislative act."

October 16, 2010:

      Click here for Kent Mallett, "Johnstown Man Sues GMAC Mortgage, Alleges Fraud in Foreclosure Process," The Newark Advocate.

      Click here for George Gombossy, "Foreclosure Crisis Discovered through Modest $75K Maine Home," Connecticut Watchdog.      

      Click here for Federal and State Compliance Auditors, "Why Robo-Signatures Are Illegal in California and Other Non-Judicial Foreclosure States," Veritas.

October 17, 2010:

      Click here for Louise Story, "Banks Shared Clients' Profits, but Not Losses," The New York Times.

October 18, 2010:

      Click here for William K. Black, "When All Else Fails, Find the Foreclosure Facts," Benzinga.

      Click here for Ryan McCarthy, "'Foreclosure Mill' Employees Got Gifts for Altering Documents, Witness Says, The Huffington Post.

      Click here for Kathy D. Patrick Esq., Gibbs & Bruns LLP, "Holders' Notice to Trustee and Master Servicer of Failure of Master Servicer to Perform . . . ,"  Letter to Bank of America.   The banks have not assigned the mortgage Notes to the trusts, have not notified the trusts of defects with the mortgages, and have not notified the trusts when mortgages go into default. 
  
      Click here for Floyd Norris, "Some Sand in the Gears of Securitizing," The New York Times.

      Click here for Marian Wang, "Who's Who in the Foreclosure Scandal: A Primer on the Players," Pro Publica (18 October 2010).

      Click here for Monty Pelerin, "Mauldin on Mortgage Foreclosure Crisis," Economic Noise.

      Click here for Tom Eley, "Wall Street, White House Blame Homeowners in Foreclosure Crisis,"  Global Research.     

October 19, 2010:

      Click here for Zachary A. Goldbarb, "Task Force Probing Whether Banks Broke Federal Laws During Home Seizures,"
      The Washington Post.

      Click here for Don Babwin, "Chicago-Area Sheriff Halts Foreclosure Evictions," ABC News.

      Click here for Steve Lash, "Maryland Court of Appeals Adopts New Foreclosure Rule," The Daily Record [Maryland].

      Click here for Mike Konczal, "Foreclosure Fraud for Dummies, 2: What Is a Note, and Why Is It So Important?," Ritholtz.
 
      Click here for Charles Toutant, "Class Action Foreclosure Lawsuit Filed against Bank of America," New Jersey Law Journal.
      "Bank of American has been hit with a class-action suit on behalf of homeowners seeking damages for alleged disregard of
      foreclosure process rules."  The complaint, in Beals v. Bank of America, N.A., 10-cv-05427 (U.S.D.C., D. New Jersey,  __ October 2010), alleges that B. of A. regularly files foreclosures without owning the mortgage Notes and with forged documenets.
      Plaintiffs ask that the foreclosures be declared void and request damages for emotional distress, loss of credit, time lost from work, attorneys' fees, and punitive damages.

      Click here for Arthur Delaney, "Lawsuits Reflect Widespread Frustration with Government's Mortgage Modification Program,"
      The Huffington Post.
      "A federal judicial panel recently consolidated class-action lawsuits from across the country alleging Bank of America treated homeowners with bad faith when they applied for mortgage modifications under the Obama administration's Home Affordable Modification Program."   B. of A. accepted the money and then did not do the promised modifications.  The complaint in In Re
      Bank of America Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) Contract Litigation, MDL No. 2193 (D. Mass), alleges breach of contract, breach of duty of fair dealing, promissory estoppel, and violations of the Consumer Protection Act.

October 20, 2010:

      Click here for Masaccio, "The Dog Ate My Note and/or Mortgage," Fire Dog Lake.

      Click here for George Washington, "Foreclosure Expert Confirms Mortgages Pledged Multiple Times, Not Actually Securitized:  Document Problem Is Really a System of 'Push-Button Fraud,'" Zero Hedge.

      Click here for Gretchen Morgenson and Andrew Martin, "Battle Lines Forming in Clash over Foreclosures," The New York Times.

      Click here for Masaccio, "Legal Issues on Enforcement of Promissory Notes," Fire Dog Lake.

      Click here for Barry Meier, "Foreclosures Profit Some Equity Firms," The New York Times.

October 21, 2010:

      Click here for Ariana Eunjung Cha, "Florida Activists Read Between the Lines on Foreclosure Paperwork," The Washington Post.
      
      Click here for Judge Anthony Rondolino, "Order Dismissing First Amended Complaint" in Deutsche Bank v. Decker, Case No. 09-20548-CI-13 (Circuit Court of the Sixth Judicial Circuit in and for Penellas County, Florida.

      Click here for Peter Coy, Paul M. Barrett, and Chad Terhune, "How Joseph Lents Dodge Foreclosure for Eight Years and Started a Movement," Bloomberg News.

      Click here for Bill Chappell, "Foreclosure Defense: A Strategy Based on Banks Losing the Paper Trail," National Public Radio.
     
      Click here for John Gittelsohn & Jody Shenn, "Banks Face Two-Front War on Bad Mortgages, Flawed Foreclosures," Bloomberg
      News.

      Click here for Peter Coy, Paul M. Barrett, and Chad Terhune, "Mortgage Mess: Shredding the Dream," Bloomberg Businessweek.
      "When you say you lose a $1.5 million negotiable instrument--that doesn't happen."  "What's incalculable is the psychic cost of a legal system that may well have let banks skirt the law.  The whole financial system is becoming a lot less transparent."

October 22, 2010:

      Click here for Grady Dennis, "Iowa Attorney General Lauches Foreclosure Probe Amid Fierce Public Outrage," The Washington
      Post.  "Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller says, . . . 'My first reaction was concern, and curiousness as to the extent of it . . . .
      My second reaction was, "How in the h--l can they let this happen?""'

      Click here for Chris Whalen, interview, "The Foreclosure Crisis Is a Cancer, and the MBS Investors Are Calling Their Lawyers,"
      Business Insider.

      Click here for Joe Nocera, "Big Problem for Banks: Due Process," The New York Times.

      Click here for Elinor Comlay and Joe Rauch, "Wells Fargo Gambles on Foreclosures, Attorneys Say," Reuters.

October 23, 2010:

      Click here for Brady Dennis, "Unraveling Foreclosure Mess," The Washington Post.

October 24, 2010:

      Click here for the Hon. Sheldon Whitehouse, "Foreclosure Moratorium Would Help Recovery," Washington Post.

      Click here for William K. Black and L. Randall Wray, "Foreclose on the Foreclosure Fraudsters, Part 2: Spurious Arguments against Holding the Fraudsters Accountable," The Huffington Post.

      Click here for Michael Powell, "Short Sales Resisted as Foreclosures Are Revived," The New York Times.  (The servicers are forbidden by the REMIC agreements from compromising with homeowners on their mortgages.)

October 25, 2010:

      Click here for Greg Hunter, "The Perfect No-Prosecution Crime."  USA Watchdog.  "Professor Black . . . , Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri KC, . . . a former bank regulator and expert in crimes committed by CEO's, says . . . 'securitized mortgage instruments are all fraudulent.'"  "It appears to me the entire mortgage/securitization industry is one giant criminal  enterprise."

      Click here for Ariana Eunjung Cha, "U.S. Probing Foreclosure Processing Firms," The Washington Post.

      Click here for Masaccio, "Foreclosure Fraud Isn't Mere Paperwork," Fire Dog L ake.  (Explains why the banks cannot fix their paperwork defects.)

      Click here for Alain Sherter, "The Varnished Truth: Bernanke Whitewash Covers Up Foreclosure Crimes," CBS BNET.  (As in the Great Depression, the States are helping the homeowners.  The federal government is protecting the illegal foreclosures.)

October 26, 2010:

      Click here for Allan Sloan, "Want to Get Away with Murder?  Become a Bank," CNN Money.

      Click here for Diane C. Lade "Stern Foreclosure Executive Resigns," Miami Herald.

      Click here for Mike Hinshaw, "Foreclosure Fiasco Factors as a Potentially Systemic Risk as Mounting Lawsuits Filed."
       Bankruptcy Home.

      Click here for Editorial, "The Mortgage Morass," The New York Times, p. A-28.

      Click here for Yves Smith, "How Did the Banks Get Away with Pledging Mortgages to Multiple Buyers?," Naked Capitalism.
      (This may be why the mortgages were not assigned by the banks to the REMIC's.  A negotiable instrument cannot be assigned to two persons at the same time.)

October 27, 2010:

      Click here for Greg Hunter, "The Six Trillion Dollar Problem," USA Watchdog. "[T]here are a little more than 60 million homes mortgsages in the Mortgage Electronic Registry System. . .  .  In MERS there is no physical written record of a "Promissory Note." . . .  That means in almost every single state, the banks cannot legally foreclose on your home without this document."

      Click here for Andrew Martin and Motoko Rich, "Homeowners Facing Foreclosure Demand Recourse," The New York Times.

      Click here for Brady Dennis, "Federal Bailout Oversight Panel Raises Alarms over Foreclosure Crisis," The Washington Post.

      Click here for Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, "Amicus Curiae Brief in U.S. Bank v. Renfro (Case No. CV-10-716322,"
      Court of Common Please, Cuyahoga County, Ohio).   (Accuses GMAC of systematic fraud on the court. )

      Click here

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