Just think, that $50 million dollars in one county, lost to mortgage fraud via fraudulent deeds. Here’s another one:
Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown … announced that a suspended Richmond Hill attorney and a licensed Queens Village real estate broker have been charged with selling the house out from under an elderly Jamaica, Queens, man who had been hospitalized after suffering a stroke and then repeatedly flipping the property to drive up the price. The suspended attorney is also charged in a separate real estate fraud scheme in which he fraudulently obtained the Queens house of a U.S. Army sergeant serving overseas. (mortgagefraud.org)
While the nation is concentrating on the problems caused by so-called subprime loans, there is a subterranean culture of title counterfeiting, deed forgery, identity theft and collusion, where crooks not only forge loan applications, falsify income, and steal identities—they also forge deeds as well.
An Ohio attorney was disbarred, allegedly for a cornucopia of crimes, including: (allegedly) falsifying the deed to an elderly client’s farm, then transferring the property to herself, then giving the farm to her client’s church, and then taking charitable deductions for the gift. (Toledo Bar Assn. v. Cook)
Across the country in Colorado, another attorney was disciplined for “serious misconduct” in connection with the reported falsification of a notary signature and seal on a Deed.
People v. Sheffer, No. GC98A112 (consolidated with GC98A113)
The Presiding Disciplinary Judge and Hearing Board suspended the respondent, Mary Jody Sheffer, for two years for failing to segregate funds in violation of Colo. RPC 1.15(c), for intentionally falsifying a notary signature, and for improperly using a notary seal of another on a Deed of Trust and Request for Release of Deed of Trust and Release, in violation of Colo. RPC 8.4(a), Colo. RPC 8.4(b), Colo. RPC 8.4(c), and Colo. RPC 8.4(d). Although the presumptive sanction for such serious misconduct is disbarment, substantial mitigating factors reduced the sanction to a two-year suspension.
We are looking at a possible trillion dollar mortgage meltdown over the next few years. This is a financial tsunami which has dire consequences for property owners, city taxing authorities and the nation as a whole. And, while some limit their investigation to the “subprime” mortgage industry, there is a broader culture of greed, graft, conspiracy and collusion which threatens the nation’s economic well being.
The United States is a litigious country, having more lawyers, filing more lawsuits than most of the world’s nations combined. The question we raise here, is that with the extent of mortgage fraud, deed and document forgery, title insurance fraud, and insider collusion, will the entire deck of cards collapse before a legal remedy can stop this train wreck?
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