Fight Foreclosure |Foreclosure Fraud |HAMP|Loan Modification
In the Foreclosure Fight there are several “Tip of the Spear” Law Practitioners. The reason for posting this article is to open your eyes regarding foreclosure fraud and how you can fight foreclosure based on the mortgage note the mortgage and the fraudulent foreclosure practices of the “foreclosure Mill Law firms, the Servicers and the courts who are allowing wrongful foreclosures simply to clear their dockets!
Thank you Florida Foreclosure Defense Law Offices of Carol C. Asbury
This article addresses some of the traps that have engulfed my clients, causing the loss, or near loss of their homes. Later I will explain why it is more advantageous to litigate rather than seek a loan modification or walking away from your home…
Trap 1: Not hiring a mortgage defense attorney who believes in winning.
Truth: You will lose your home.
Trap 2: Trusting the bank is delaying your foreclosure lawsuit while “considering” your loan modification application.
Truth: That’s a LIE. The Bank’s game is to keep you from defending the foreclosure until the Court orders your house sold and you lose your home.
Trap 3: Paying a Loan Modification Company or Loan Modification Attorney for a loan modification. THERE ARE NO loan modifications.
Truth: The Home Affordable Mortgage Program (HAMP) is not guaranteed loan modification; it’s free, if your lender is participating; and, if you agree to a HAMP loan modification, you become worse off than a renter. The truth is, loan modification is not available because the Banks DO NOT own your Note. The Note was sold to a Trust, whose investors often won’t agree to a loan modification.
Trap4: Trusting the Loan Modification Company or Loan Modification Attorney handling your foreclosure suit.
Truth: No one is DEFENDING your foreclosure suit. Result: You lose your home.
Trap 5: Signing an answer handed to you by a non-attorney or Loan Modification Attorney as a “Pro Se” defendant.
Truth: “Pro Se” means you are representing yourself and you may be admitting to something you do not want to admit. Result: you lose your home.
Trap 6: Ignoring the foreclosure complaint.
Truth: Big Mistake! Result: You lose your home.
Trap 7: Thinking Bankruptcy will solve the foreclosure.
Truth: Bankruptcy may be an option but in most cases it only stalls the foreclosure. You need to seek an attorney who will explain the difference as well as your options.
Trap8: Mortgage Defense Attorneys are expensive.
Truth: Not True! It’s more cost effective and adventitious to defend the foreclosure than to seek a Loan Modification or walk away. Fighting is the ONLY way you will win. And you CAN win!
Trap 9: There are no defenses against foreclosure.
Truth: NOT True! Foreclosure defenses are available because of the securitization of the Notes to Trusts, who sold unregulated securities to investors for three times the value of your Note. Like any Ponzi Scheme, it has holes.
You CAN win!
There are Forged notes, lost notes, intentional destruction of notes, unauthorized people signing mortgage assignments or endorsing notes, missing documentation, fraudulently fabricated documents, and different plaintiffs foreclosing on the same property, plaintiffs who do not exist and the inability or refusal to provide proof of purchase and/or ownership of the promissory notes.
These are some of the situations I have encountered in my practice of over 24 years.
In addition, there are more and more claims arising from predatory lending practices of the Plaintiffs bank; including, violations of state and federal law, deceptive trade practices, and unfair or abusive dept collection.
Fighting the bank is advantageous to you. The goal of any good litigation attorney is to utilize all defenses/strategies in order to obtain the best possible outcome for the borrower. Depending on the evidence, litigation may even lead to a home free and clear of any mortgage. It is all about giving you options and creating leverage against the banks.
You need to have a plan of action, a direction, and understanding of why that plan is good for you
Here is her website www.FightTheBanksNow.com
Thanks again Carol, keep up the good fight. Together we can stop and fight illegal foreclosures and hopefully stop this mortgage mess!Homeowners need to know their legal rights!
Strategy To Dismiss Every Foreclosure In Florida
An Anarchist’s Strategy To Dismiss Every Foreclosure In Florida
Matt Weidner, An VERY Progressive Attorney in Florida Posted this On February 7th, 2010 ·
Courts Are Overwhelmed With Foreclosures
Across the country, circuit court judges and their staff are becoming overwhelmed and frustrated by the total avalanche of foreclosure cases that have been dumped in their courtrooms. In Pinellas County, Circuit Court judges who used to handle like 400 foreclosure cases are now handling something like 3,000.These judges still have one judicial assistant and the same limited resources the had before the crisis. When the judge’s loan JA sits down to start the day, they are bombarded with phone calls and mail and people in their face every single second….it’s chaos, its a burden and it is completely untenable for the long run.
Things have gotten so bad for the judges that I’m told at least two Circuit Court Judges in Pinellas County (Linda Allan and Douglas Baird) have announced they were no longer going to hear Motions to Dismiss filed by Defendants in foreclosure cases, but were going to start just denying them across the board without even having a hearing on the matter. Now that’s one way to deal with the crisis. It’s an unconstitutional, unfair and totally biased approach that completely ignores the law and the rights of the citizens these judges took an oath to serve, but it is one way to deal with the crisis. (Look for Appeals To Come If This Practice Really Begins to Take Hold.)I know, Let’s Throw All The Rules Out The Window
Many of the Plaintiff’s attorneys that are working so hard to throw borrowers out of their home cannot rely on good, solid, honest legal work to accomplish their job. As an attorney who sees the work of these firms every day, I am just astonished that the Courts continue to allow such horrendous practice to continue unchecked, but there seems to be little desire to try and force a correction of the behavior. Just in case you think I’m overstating the problem, here is an excerpt from the Florida Supreme Court’s Task Force Report on Residential Mortgage Foreclosures
- Finally, it is critical that these firms be candid, clear, and truthful and accurate in connection with pleadings and affidavits filed with the Courts. A leading plaintiff’s lawyer and a major plaintiff’s law firm have been the subject of a public reprimand and sanctions due to untruthful filings with the courts. Judges continue to see affidavits of amounts due and owing signed by law firm employees, and cost affidavits charging very high service of process fees for process serving firms owned by the law firm principals. To some extent, it is fair to be concerned whether the press of the case load is interfering with a judge’s ability to police the conduct of the firms before them in these usually uncontested, unopposed foreclosure cases.
The full report can be found here but the bottom line is this, the lenders and their law firms are lying, lying, lying. They’re committing fraud on the courts on an unprecedented scale. The report of the Supreme Court is a bit sanitized, but the firms are whipping out foreclosure cases so quickly that they’re not even bothering to get the proper documents that prove they have a correct basis to file a suit from the outset. Some firms have ownership interests in the process servers who are supposed to personally hand the lawsuit to a defendant and they’re both charging exorbitant fees for this service and lying about whether proper service has been obtained or even attempted. And finally, the biggie….they’re lying, lying, lying about the evidence they’re submitting to the court, these come primarily in the forms of Affidavits and Assignments submitted to support Summary Judgments of Foreclosure.
Affidavits and Assignments in Foreclosure, Liars Re-Telling Lies Re-created From Fiction
There are several areas where the lying is reduced to black and white and submitted to the court.
Assignment of Mortgage
First, when the foreclosing Plaintiff is not the original lender, there must be a formal Assignment of Mortgage executed which says, “The Original Lender Assigns This Mortgage to the Plaintiff in This Case.” This document is needed to give the Plaintiff the proper legal basis to be suing the Defendant. Many of the originating lenders are no longer operating so getting a real assignment from a dissolved corporation would be difficult. In other cases, the Plaintiff introduces an Assignment of Mortgage executed by “MERS” a shadowy, shifty, shady backroom dealer of mortgages. The Assignment of Mortgage issue is problematic even when a mortgage was only assigned from an originating lender to the foreclosing Plaintiff, but in cases where a mortgage has changed hands many times, there should be an unbroken chain of properly executed assignments from originating lender straight through to foreclosing Plaintiff. (In fact, this requirement of an unbroken chain of assignments was originally part of the foreclosure procedures in Pinellas County, but this requirement was stripped.) The problem is these assignments are frequently fraudulent. The lenders know this, their attorneys know this and the courts know this, but they’re all just going ahead and pretending like it’s not an issue. IT IS AN ISSUE!
Affidavit of Amounts Due and Owing
The second area of Affidavit Fraud is the Affidavit of Amounts Due and Owing which states, “Your Undersigned Affiant is an employee of the Plaintiff and I SWEAR Based on my PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE that the Plaintiff is Owed, $150,000?. In a case where the original lender is the foreclosing Plaintiff, an employee of that lender could sign such an affidavit based on their review of the company’s accounting records. In most of the foreclosure cases currently pending in courts around the country, the mortgages have changed hands many times and there is simply no basis whatsoever for any person to sign an affidavit stating that they have any knowledge whatsoever of who is owed any money whatsoever. These affidavits are legally insufficient, they’re false and fraudulent.
Affidavit of Lost Note
The third area of Affidavit Fraud is the Affidavit of Lost Note which states, “Your Undersigned Affiant is an employee of the Plaintiff who had posession of the note when it was lost and while we looked long and hard to find the note, it’s just plain disappeared and we just will never find it.” In cases where the Plaintiff cannot locate the original note, this Affidavit is required in order to “Re-establish The Lost Note”, a technical process which must be followed in order to successfully and honestly proceed with a foreclosure case. There are two problems here. First, in many cases, the Affidavit does not include the correct language wherein the Plaintiff asserts that it was in possession of the note when it was lost. The affidavit states, “the note was in possession of someone (we don’t know who) when it was lost”. The other variation of this is when the Plaintiff is in possession of the note but they don’t bother disclosing this to the court.
Laws and Rules Just Don’t Matter Anymore, Everyone Hop On Board The Fraud Train!
So if the Plaintiffs and their attorneys are engaging in massive and systemic fraud and the courts are totally aware of this and yet it’s going totally unpunished and unanswered why doesn’t everyone just get on the fraud train? I mean why not? Well here’s one way that consumers and anarchists could engage in fraud that would totally throw the system into chaos. If rebels and anarchists and people who just don’t care executed and recorded Satisfactions of Mortgages across the country, it would send the entire foreclosure system into collapse. A Satisfaction of Mortgage is a one page document that costs $8.50 to record. It can be produced on a home computer, filled out correctly then sent in along with a money order or cashier’s check. The Clerk of Court is required to record it and there would be no way of ever knowing where these fraudulently produced satisfactions were coming from. While the lenders were trying to figure out how to deal with this massive problem, they would have no choice but to stop the pursuit of the foreclosure cases.
Anarchy Is a Crime- Revolution is a Crime.
Make no mistake, doing this is wrong. It is a crime. A serious crime. I would not do it and I’m not seriously suggesting anyone should, especially for their own mortgage. But what if? I mean what if some modern day Robin Hood or Paul Revere set out with a few hundred bucks and a few hours on a computer and started just sending in satisfactions? And what if, at the same time these same band of anarchist Robin Hoods also filed with the courts “Notice of Voluntary Dismissal and Release of Lis Pendens”? I mean when the law firms that are prosecuting these cases are so out of touch that they have no idea what’s happening with their files and they have no contact whatsoever with the lenders they claim to represent, it would take them months to figure out if their law office or their client really did dismiss the case or whether this was another one of those Anarchist Dismissals.
But if the system is so broken down that judges are engaging in systematic denial of a defendant’s rights and if the Supreme Court of Florida is acknowledging in writing
that they are aware of widespread and systemic fraud being perpetrated on courts across the country and they’re doing nothing to stop it,
isn’t a little bit of anarchy in order?
An Amazing Case of Loan and Mortgage Fraud
Loan and mortgage fraud is becoming big business across the country and crooks continue to find new ways to take advantage of almost anyone and steal any identity. The reality is…Loan and mortgage fraud is becoming big business across the country and crooks continue to find new ways to take advantage of almost anyone and steal any identity. Read more
Supreme Court Helps The Foreclosure Fight
The Fight Against Foreclosure, Illegal Foreclosure Filings and the Ongoing Discovery into Mortgage Lender Violations has a friend in the Supreme Court
Here is something that you probably did not read in your local newspaper or saw on the news… In a surprising 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that national banks are still subject to the laws of the states they operate in. What made the ruling unusual is that Justice Scalia wrote the opinion and the other four conservative judges were in dissent (Roberts, Thomas, Alito and the normal swing vote Kennedy).
The ruling overturned an appeals court ruling that said that state attorneys general cannot investigate banks if they operate in more than one state.
The case in question involved the enforcement of fair lending laws in N.Y. State, specifically allegations that some banks were charging minorities higher interest rates. Instead, even though these are state laws, the appeals court had said that only the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) had the power to investigate. In practice, this means that the laws were null and void, since the OCC has a lousy track record on such issues. Here is The Summary of the Case
“This is a huge win for consumers across the nation,” said Andrew Cuomo, the attorney general for the state of New York, in a statement.
The case began in 2005 when Cuomo’s predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, asked banks for information about their lending practices. The banks sued to block the probe, and lower courts agreed with the banks. Spitzer had threatened to issue subpoenas to get the data.
The Supreme Court ruled that Spitzer could not have issued subpoenas, but was allowed to bring an enforcement action if violations were uncovered. States are free to pursue investigations of banks for consumer protection issues in courts, the ruling said.
The Clearing House, the banking group that brought the suit, said it was “disappointed” with the decision. Another bank group, the Financial Services Round-table, went even further, saying that the decision “will create a patchwork of 50 state laws that destroys the efficiencies of the national market.” Sounds Like Sour Grapes to Me!
The Key Problem has been that Enforcing state laws is simply not a priority for a division of the Treasury Department. And has caused jurisdictional problems for foreclosure defense. While clearly there can be a problem if multiple agencies have jurisdiction in regulation, allowing things to slip through the cracks, there can also be problems when there is only one regulator and that regulator is in the pocket of the regulated. It is harder to capture all 50 state attorneys general and the OCC, than it is just the OCC alone. Make no mistake, the head of the OCC, John Dugan, a holdover from the last administration, is very much a creature of the big banks he is supposed to be overseeing. The OCC ranks just behind the OTS in being an ineffectual regulator during the bubble.
While the state attorneys general will not be able to issue subpoenas on their own authority (they need approval from a state judge), it does mean that they do not have to sit on their hands if they think the banks are breaking the law. It also will mean a more fair application of the law and your legal rights.
If the appeals court ruling had been allowed to stand, then the state attorneys general would have been free to go after a little community bank that only operated in their state, but unable to go after the big banks like J.P. Morgan , Bank of America , Citigroupand Wells Fargo that dominate the banking business. Sort of like telling them, yeah, it’s okay for the state to go after the street level drug traffickers, but not allowed to go after the kingpins.
