Blog posts with "foreclosure crisis"

 “Despite what you may have heard, the foreclosure crisis is far from over, especially in Florida, which leads the nation, more than 300,000 cases still pending, another half-a-million homeowners delinquent, hundreds of thousands of modified loans about to balloon in payments,” according to economics correspondent Paul Solman in this PBS NewsHour video, which highlights several examples of the "600,000 Florida families who have lost their homes since 2007, 5.5 million homes lost nationw...

Wells Fargo, the largest mortgage servicer in the nation, was unable to keep its infamous Home Mortgage Foreclosure Attorney Procedure Manual from being introduced into evidence in a federal case (case number 1:13-ap-01553) before  Judge Allan L. Gropper of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The recently exposed Wells Fargo manual appears to instruct foreclosure mill attorneys how to fabricate missing loan documents to foreclose on homeowners. In the case, the f...

Six months ago state and federal regulators agreed to settle for $25 billion with banks in relation to numerous claims of lending and mortgage foreclosure fraud and abuse. What seemed to be a good deal for the alleged perpetrators of one of the most economically detrimental lending schemes in history has in fact proven to be a great deal for the alleged perpetrators. From March 1 to June 30 138,000 homeowners with distressed properties have received some form of relief. However, that number m...

When homeowner Lynn Szymoniak received a mortgage foreclosure complaint, she turned the tables on the foreclosing banks by utilizing her skills as an attorney and fraud detective to investigate tens of thousands of foreclosure documents in other foreclosure cases. After discovering that the foreclosing banks were engaging in pervasive fraud, she brought a False Claims Act lawsuit against the banks on behalf of the federal government. Now, CBS News reports that homeowner Lynn Szymoniak “i...

  Lynn Szymoniak, a South Florida attorney and foreclosure fraud victim who successfully challenged the corrupt banking practice of falsifying ownership records (such as notes and assignments) commonly referred to as “robo-signing,” is now being subjected to what she describes as continuing harassment from the very bank she exposed as perpetrating the fraud.   In 2008, Szymoniak’s home went into foreclosure as a result of medical emergencies which drained her income and assets. As a...

BofA is currently receiving a substantial amount of press for a very small pilot program that promises to rent homeowners’ homes back to them instead of foreclosing on the homes. However, the program requires homeowners to be at least two months behind in their mortgage payments to qualify for the program, and fewer than 1000 slots are available in a few select markets. Another ploy to encourage struggling homeowners to default? Maybe. More from the L.A. Times: The "Mortgage to Lease" prog...

A revelation regarding the source of key information driving recent foreclosure-abuse related settlements was recently announced. It was revealed that whistleblowers were, and continue to be, instrumental in exposing and assisting in the prosecution of the fraud and abuses perpetrated by multinational banks against homeowners. This press release from the newsroom of the nation’s leading whistleblower law firm in Washington, D.C., Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto announced the news: Today, the...