Oppenheim Law would never accuse the banks of committing fraud, perjury, impersonation, notary fraud, contempt of court, lying, violating Constitutional protections, or being tax cheats. Nevertheless, we do make this advisory: Be careful of what you sign.

Why?

As soon as you think  the coast is clear, it’s the return of the robo-signers.

Suspected robo-signed documents are cropping up again in county deed records, according to the Associated Press. These new documents suggest the previous document mill scandals are part of an endemic problem at banks, not a one-off affair like the banks would have you believe.

In explaining the document mill scandals, banks claimed they were crushed by a gigantic amount of paperwork. It was while attempting to deal with such a large amount of paperwork that “mistakes” were made, according to the banks. Such claims are now being met with a raised eyebrow.

Registrars in several states have reported seeing suspicious documents. But now, the banks can’t claim they are under a mountain of paperwork: foreclosures, sales, and refinances are all at lower levels than they were in the past several years. Most of the documents under suspicion now are not even related to foreclosures. Rather, they mostly deal with new home purchases and refinances.

The banks are even using some of the exact same names heavily publicized when the scandals first broke like Linda Green and Crystal Moore. Such behavior points to an industry that sees itself as untouchable: too big to fail and too big to be regulated.

The proposed settlement between the banks and the states includes no criminal charges. Critics say that such slaps on the wrists only foster a culture of impunity, and they appear to be right.

This doesn’t mean some are not trying to fight back. The Michigan state attorney general filed criminal subpoenas against several mortgage servicers after 23 counties filed complaints. John O’Brien, the registrar of Essex County in Massachusetts, and Jeff Thigpen, the registrar of Guilford County, North Carolina, have both refused to accept documents suspected of being robo-signed. Mr. O’Brien even demanded a signed affidavit from Bank of America after he received several documents signed Linda Burton, another name that popped up in connection with the document mill scandal. Bank of America refused to handover the affidavit, and instead resent the paperwork signed by someone else. According to Mr. O’Brien, such behavior is evidence of “consciousness of guilt” on behalf of the bank.

Just like acid reflux, robo-signing doesn’t seem like it’s going away without a fight!

Dear Wall Street: We’re not in Vegas anymore! The Sin City “players” of Wall Street might be trading in the fancy hotel rooms for prison cells.

The SEC is now following the Federal Reserve and the Senate is chastising Wall Street for effectively causing the economic crisis.  The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that they too will be joining the bandwagon and fining the major banks on Wall Street for fraudulently causing the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression. They follow on the heels of the Federal Reserve and the United States Senate in lambasting the “banksters”.

Nearly 2½ years into the economic crisis and not a single individual has yet been held accountable or responsible for their actions. All of a sudden, a rein of terror is coming down on Wall Street.

Well, all I can say is that it’s about time and we told you so. Elliot Spitzer did so as well. Here is an interview he did with Anderson Cooper last night (tip: fast forward to about 11:08).

Spitzer goes over the massive fraud perpetrated by Wall Street and demonstrates how easy it would be to put Wall Street executives in jail. His co-interviewee, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone Magazine, made the analogy of a car dealer selling cars he knew were defective and then taking out life insurance policies on the passengers of the cars. This is exactly what Goldman Sachs and the other investment banks were doing; only Mr. Taibbi left out the fact that before selling the cars, the banks took them to mechanics that strip the breaks!

In light of the flood of reports, perhaps a second look needs to be taken at the homeowners of this country. Those homeowners who are not paying their mortgages, whether because they cannot afford them or because they do not see the point of paying a mortgage worth double their home’s value, are sometimes criticized and called deadbeats. I have a new label to apply to them: protesters. How can someone be criticized for not giving these Wall Street criminals money, especially when they are the reason our economy imploded and housing prices collapsed!?!?

Two years ago I suggested that if the allegations against Wall Street were in fact true that a Shay’s Rebellion  2.0 would manifest itself.  Who would have ever thought that the evidence now suggests a scheme and sham much greater and profound than Madoff’s Ponzi scheme?

I used to think that Wall Street had the brightest minds coming out of our top schools and thus they knew how to count cards: a perfectly legal approach to beating the odds in Vegas.

However, who would ever have thought that our most respected names on Wall Street would cheat the house by playing with a marked deck!

May I respectfully suggest that this crisis did not start on Main Street, it started on what should become Prison-Wall Street!

In case you missed this month’s Foreclosure Fraud Workshop hosted by Legal Blogger and Foreclosure Defense Attorney Roy Oppenheim, South Florida Law Blog brings the instant replay!

If you have questions about Florida foreclosure news and how it affects you, post them in the blog comments and next week we will post a blog with Frequently Asked Questions and Answers.

Florida Foreclosure Defense Attorney Roy Oppenheim reminds
you of two things:

1. Today is Election Day! Don’t forget to vote!

2. Tomorrow is Oppenheim Law’s Foreclosure Fraud Workshop and Webcast on OppenheimLaw.tv at 6pm!

Find out what this means to the Florida homeowner as Roy Oppenheim hosts Florida’s Foreclosure Bank Fraud Workshop on Wednesday November 3rd from 6:00 to 7:00pm via webcast or live from a Boca Raton studio.

The Good News: Big Banks Told Not to ‘Fix’ a Fraud

One of Roy Oppenheim’s favorite articles this weekend is from the Wall Street Journal by Robbie Whelan; it’s about Ohio’s attorney general pressing banks to modify mortgage loans versus ‘fixing’ false and sloppy paperwork. Attorney General Richard Cordray could not have said it better:

“The banks are committing fraud on the court, essentially perjury, and then saying ‘Whoops! You caught me! Here’s some different evidence and use that instead,’ ” Mr. Cordray said in an interview Friday. “I know a lot of judges are not going to take kindly to that.”

The Interesting News: Bank of America Letter to NYT Editor

BofA steps up to the plate with the NYT, but what does this really mean?

We don’t claim perfection and will address mistakes quickly when they arise, but Bank of America is doing all we can to keep people in their homes, or ensure a fair, consistent process if that is not possible said Barbara J. Desoer President of Bank of America Loan in a Letter to the Editor in The New York Times.

Florida News: South Florida Foreclosure Rate One of Highest

In the third quarter of 2010, South Florida led the nation with the highest number of foreclosure filings among large metropolitan areas, with more than 59,064 homes in distress. That’s a 24 percent increase from the previous quarter, and a 9 percent jump from the same period in 2009. Led by a large increase in bank repossessions, the region’s foreclosure rate ranked 7th nationwide, with one out of every 41 homes in some stage of foreclosure.

Across South Florida, bank repossession reached 12,963 in the third quarter, up 15.1 percent from the previous quarter and up 98 percent from last year’s third quarter.

With the break of the foreclosure scandal last month, everything has come to a screeching halt.

Find out what this mean to the Florida homeowner this week as Roy Oppenheim hosts Florida’s Foreclosure Bank Fraud Workshop on Wednesday November 3^rd from 6:00 to 7:00pm via webcast on www.oppenheimlaw.tv or live from a Boca Raton studio.

Here is an excerpt:

It is absolutely true that the homeowners that Bank of America wants to foreclose on are in default on loans they should never have gotten in the first place. (Gee, whose fault was that?) But it simply does not follow that the bank therefore has an absolute right to take back the home. Under the law, it has to prove it has that right — by filing documents that show that the owner of the mortgage has conveyed that right to it. That’s why this affidavit scandal isn’t some legal nicety. It’s about the single most important value of American jurisprudence: due process.

“Just because the homeowner hasn’t paid his mortgage doesn’t mean anybody in the world can kick him out,” said Katherine Porter, a visiting law professor at Harvard. “The bank has to have the standing to do that.” She added that the bank’s argument was a little like saying that someone who committed a crime shouldn’t receive a trial because he’s so obviously guilty. America just isn’t supposed to work that way.

Real estate law is moving at the speed of light and the playing field is changing when it comes to banks and foreclosure fraud. Oppenheim shares his views on the Oppenheim Law video channel discussing how, up until now, most members of the judiciary were not taking homeowners seriously and the playing field is changing.  He shares a quick overview on what has been happening in the last few weeks concerning the Florida foreclosure fraud crisis.

Your editorial “The Politics of Foreclosure” (October 9) misses a number of significant legal as well as macro economic issues. In fact the editorial’s latent sarcasm (i.e., “the affidavit was supposed to be signed by the nameless, faceless employee in the back office who reviewed the file, not the other nameless, faceless employee who sits in the front”), suggests a clear lack of respect for (i) the protections afforded to all of us by the United States Constitution, (ii) State Rights and (iii) how the real property recordation systems throughout the US have played a critical role in capital formation for 150 years.

As a real estate attorney in Florida who previously practiced on Wall Street, I personally know of countless cases where the bank sues the wrong homeowner for foreclosure or where two banks claim to own the same mortgage.  It seems that you are significantly discounting the importance of procedural due process that requires that an affidavit be sworn under oath and that an individual has personal knowledge of the amounts owed by a borrower. Further, you are making undue light of notary fraud and perjury (both criminal acts) when an individual attests to another’s signature with knowledge that such attestation is false.  Such conduct is not only a violation of state law but also of various federal laws such as The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, violations under the Federal Trade Commission for Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices, mail fraud, wire fraud, and possibly racketeering. These “mistakes” are not mere technical issues but go to the core of our legal system.

Your editorial completely disregards an important constitutional concept of legal standing.  Standing is the substantive due process notion of what a party must do in order to have the legal right to bring a legal action through our judicial system. Without the protective concept of standing, anyone could sue anyone at any time, ultimately causing legal anarchy. To fabricate standing, the banks used fraudulent assignments, bad notaries, and allowed for perjured documents to be presented to judges. The banks were forced to engage in such conduct because just like Humpty Dumpy the banks broke the mortgage into different parts, splitting the Note from the Mortgage by assigning the Mortgages to a third party (MERS) and selling the Notes to another entity. The Notes were then further sold off in traunches. However, to put the “egg” back together again in order to foreclose and have standing required a whole lot of bogus documents that were never anticipated by Wall Street.

As for State Rights, had President Obama not vetoed a bill that required each state to require the other to respect the other’s notary requirements, the banks’ would have run off to the state that has the least protective and most flimsy notary rules. We have seen this script before when South Dakota became the home of choice for almost all credit card issuers; residents in other states wound up with usurious interest rates sometimes in excess of 30 percent a year. It seems that your editorial board is not consistent when it comes to advocating for the rights of States to protect its own citizens in the manner such states deem most appropriate.

Finally, had mortgages not been permitted to be assigned behind a black veil of MERS where the assignments are not made public as with a formal state-run recordation system, most of the problems we are now addressing could have been avoided.  In his acclaimed book The Mystery of Capital, Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, Hernando de Soto articulates clearly that America’s and the West’s protection of property rights and its open and transparent recordation system has been the true engine of inbound capital flows that allowed America to go from a developing nation 150 years to one where the dollar, at least for now, is the world’s reserve currency.

Let me be absolutely clear: Your editorial will make future investors of real property, particularly foreigners, think twice about our entire real property system.  Questions will be asked for a generation how banks literally hijacked the judicial system turning it into their own collection system while dispensing with the rules of law that have protected property right owners from the day our great nation was founded. Had we just let our legal system do its job we would have made it out of this mess.  Next time, please think twice about throwing the baby out with the bath water just because you think you know who the real culprit is here. Remember, had this whole house of cards that started on Wall Street not come tumbling down: Humpty Dumpy would still be perched on his wall today and homeowners would not be struggling to pay their mortgage because they lost their livelihoods. Maybe, just maybe, the banks are now getting their just desserts.

And if you believe the latest news that Bank of America is not too worried about the looming tsunami of mortgage repurchases because it is socking away tons of cash, think again.

From the trenches

Roy Oppenheim

PS: In case you missed it, here’s a link to Roy Oppenheim’s interview with the BBC about the foreclosure fraud scandal.

Homeowners are walking away from mortgages even when they can afford to pay, and so is the MBA. Yes, the MBA walked away from its headquarters, a $79 million building they purchased three years ago in Washington D.C.

Oppenheim discussed in several South Florida Law Blog posts why he thinks MBA President and CEO John Courson is clueless when it comes to morals and ethics. He was happy to shed insight to the Daily Show producers on the irony of MBA’s own strategic default considering Courson’s countless media quotes questioning the homeowner’s moral obligation to pay the mortgage.

An excerpt from The New York Times:

John Courson, president and C.E.O. of the Mortgage Bankers Association, recently told The Wall Street Journal that homeowners who default on their mortgages should think about the “message” they will send to “their family and their kids and their friends.”

For more foreclosure news, stay connected with Oppenheim Law on Twitter @oplaw, Facebook and YouTube.

You’d think we’re referring to an environmental wasteland.  Instead these are the words Roy Oppenheim used to describe the state of the mortgage and foreclosure crisis in this week’s special workshop stamped: Toxic Foreclosures and Foreclosure Fraud.

‘Foreclosure Bill Blocked’ reads today’s Wall Street Journal headline. As Oppenheim suggested a few days ago, Obama today announced his first significant veto amid a debacle over banks’ paperwork.

False Data = Fraud

This afternoon, Bloomberg News reported Bank of America Corp., the biggest U.S. lender, extended a freeze on foreclosures not just to 23 states but to all 50 states as concern spread among federal and local officials that homes are being seized based on false data.

“When I was in law school my professors would say that real estate law was notorious for moving in glacier time,” said Oppenheim in his Wednesday night monthly foreclosure defense workshop. “The lightning speed of what has happened in the last few weeks could not have been predicted, it will take decades to recover from the banks’ cracked egg. Humpty Dumpty has fallen and can not be put together again.”

Watch Roy Oppenheim’s Foreclosure Defense Workshop on his YouTube Channel and see how this will impact your life whether you are in foreclosure, lost your home to foreclosure, trying to sell your home or considering to purchase a home.