Fresh news from California: the county assessor in San Francisco (joint city and county government there) just issued a scathing report on the defects of the bankster’s performance, in about 400 recent foreclosures from Jan. 09 through Nov. 11.
Here is the link to the NYT story on this.
Among the findings:
85 percent of the files contain “what appear to be clear violations of the law”.
About 2/3 of the files contain four or more irregularities.
In 8 percent, the foreclosure proceeded without even a notice of default to the borrower/homeowner. 8 percent!
85 percent showed that transfers of title to new trustees were not filed properly.
And this gem:
“And in 45 percent of the foreclosures, properties were sold at auction to entities improperly claiming to be the beneficiary of the deeds of trust. In other words, the report said, “a ‘stranger’ to the deed of trust,” gained ownership of the property; as a result, the sale may be invalid, it said.”
(Side note: this was done to me in a foreclosure on an investment in Florida, by liars working for Lehman Bros., just ten days before its collapse.)
And this stunner:
“In 6 percent of cases, the same deed of trust to a property was assigned to two or more different entities, raising questions about which of them actually had the right to foreclose. Many of the foreclosures that were scrutinized showed gaps in the chain of title, the report said, indicating that written transfers from the original owner to the entity currently claiming to own the deed of trust have disappeared.”
And that entity that our sack of fig juice hails as such a “good idea”, MERS, came in for this:
“The report found that 58 percent of loans listed in the MERS database showed different owners than were reflected in other public documents like those filed with the county recorder’s office.”
The report has been forwarded to California AG Kamala Harris.
Note that last week’s national settlement only dealt with some of the civil complaints. It does not shield the banksters from any criminal charges.
PS: we need a “category” for True Crime, or just “Banksters”.
However bad it is in California, it’s worse in Florida.
Bluthner:
actually, it is worst of all right here in Nevada. The judges in Florida started to toss out poorly documented mortgages almost two years ago.
The legal system in Nevada is only now coming to grips with the pervasive lying of the banksters, this year. Several recent judgements by the NV Supreme Court told the district courts to stop settling these claims by “equity”, e.g. siding with the banksters without question, and to apply the law as amended by the Leg. in recent years.
A new law went into effect last October that requires full proper paperwork to process a foreclosure, New filings plunged by over 90 percent when that one took effect.
This SF study could be repeated in many locales.
kev
I’m thinking “financial banditry” might work, eh?
Done.
PS kevin
there’s a whole lot of suitable “tags” you can attach too, and you can make up as many others of your own as you want, I think.
“paste-eating scumbag usurers”, say.
Gunnison:
the financial banditry label works just fine.
I also love the word “banksters”. It communicates the thought perfectly.
Kev
Won’t argue that it’s not worst of all in Nevada. In Florida the court system set up a fast-track arbitration mechanism to try to clear the (astonishing) backlog. Guess what: the banks don’t want to speed things up. Last thing they want is to bring all those properties -even if they can come up with a correct set of documents- a.) into a dead market, and b.) onto their books for maint., taxes, etc until they can be sold. It’s going to be years and years before the dust settles.
Bluthner:
same problem here. In the LV Valley, an urban area of 2 million, the banksters are sitting on something like 30,000 properties already. So almost all the new ‘exits’ are now short sales. (I saw a recent report: 90 percent of all home sales last year in this valley were short sales.)
They used to claim that the option was not available. Now they plead with the homeowners to accept one. It has to be negotiated because this is a ‘recourse’ state where the net could be pursued upon those homeowners, for decades if necessary. The servicing companies have to agree to fill in the 1099 correctly, to forego that, and to avoid a huge tax penalty.
But we now realize that in many cases, no foreclosure is even possible. Homeowners are starting to negate some of the fraudulent situations, and keep the homes.