Wednesday, February 24, 2010

The Sloppiness Of The Assembly Line, Foreclosure Mill Attorneys Continues

In Central Florida, a recent column in the Sarasota Herald Tribune comments on some of the sloppy paperwork being churned out and filed in court by assembly line, foreclosure mill law firms, and the judges letting them get away with it:
  • [T]here's much evidence, as the Florida Bar has confirmed, that some bulk-rate foreclosure firms are seriously cutting corners. And why not? They can usually file sloppy documents with unverified and false claims and get away with it, because most foreclosures are not contested. Usually, nobody even skims through the documents. A recent court ruling says judges don't need to. The checking is up to homeowners.

  • That has led to filings so ridiculous that I thought anti-foreclosure lawyer April Charney was kidding when she e-mailed a recent find from Lee County. It is a template, a fill-in-the-blanks foreclosure document, that foreclosure-mill lawyers filed in court as a real one, with almost nothing filled in.

  • But though law office employees or contractors apparently forgot, or didn't bother, to fill in names of key parties in that foreclosure, some ironic truth was left in there, Charney says. Where there should be names of the investment company that allegedly held the mortgages or transferred it to another company, the court document lists "Bogus Assignee" and "Bad Bene" (beneficiary, it seems).(1)

  • "It's a cruel joke," says Charney, a Legal Aid lawyer who has been teaching foreclosure seminars for area lawyers and judges. "We are finding these all over the country." Such flagrantly self-identifying bogus documents are only a bit more obvious and extreme than routine ones that often have equally shaky and unproven mortgage assignment claims, Charney says.

  • "It really is kind of pathetic," she says, and it shows why judges should be angry, and why more struggling homeowners should get legal help.

For the story, see Bogus foreclosure claim not isolated.

(1) For examples of mortgage assignments that literally list the name of the assignor or assignee as "BOGUS" or "BOGUS ASSIGNEE FOR INTERVENING ASMTS, see:

For those who are interested, drop me a line at homeequitytheft@yahoo.com and I can forward you copies of several bogus assignments that were recorded in public records that were kindly provided to me by a reader of the blog - be sure and put "BOGUS ASSIGNMENTS" in the subject line.