I heard on the radio today that an estimated 12 million sub prime mortgages were fraudulently obtained by illegal immigrants.

You know, I’m glad we all agreed that it wasn’t fair that poor people didn’t own homes. Life in America is soooooo much better now.

Mr_Magoo on October 7, 2008 at 7:56 PM

I live in Cape Coral (mortgage fraud central), Florida. In Aug 06, my neighbor sold his home to an “investor” for $635K. The purchaser (who never spent a day in the home) sold it a month and a half later to a buyer for $1 million. I became interested and, via the internet records available here on properties and court deed/mortgage information, began checking it out. Seems there was a group of people buying homes and then selling them in circles within their group, marking them up $200K to $500K each time (every few months). The activity I found with this group went back into late ‘04 and continued into mid ‘06. Of the transactions I checked, the group had done over $30 million in mortgages and, based on what they originally paid for the house before selling it in circles, they made well over $10 million “profit”. I called FBI and every Florida law enforcement agency there was… they DID NOTHING. I contacted the local newspaper. They got interested and ran two big spreads on it and put the squeeze on the county appraiser’s office. They contacted me saying they would take all I could give them. I went back to my research and in about a week, I had over $100 million worth of clearly fraudulent transactions. By this time, I also knew a lot more. The people involved were an attorney (closing), an appraiser, a mortgage broker and a realty company. All sub-prime loans… I gave the $100 million worth to the appraiser. To date, nothing has been done. I know for a fact fraud was committed because three of the mortgage companies involved called me back after I forwarded the information to them to talk to me about it. The readily admitted that on the information I gave them, not so much as one single mortgage payment had been made and most of the people involved had many, many mortgages (based on county records) that did not appear on their credit information prepared by the mortgage broker…. in their words, clearly fraud. Again… nothing done. Most of the properties involved were waterfront with gulf access and ranged in prices from $500K to $1.5 million.

If I had to place a bet and these mortgages were truly investigated, I would guess that outright fraud was the vast majority of transactions. There were countless properties I looked at where they were purchased using sub-prime and 100% financing that were clearly hundreds of thousands higher than the value should have been that became abandoned the day they were sold.

I thought there were people we paid to catch this sort of thing… I thought wrong.

I could write a book on the topic of mortgage fraud.

CC

CapedConservative on October 7, 2008 at 8:12 PM