Media Reports Continue Shining Light, Applying Heat On Florida's Foreclosure "Rocket Dockets"

In Martin County, Florida, Bloomberg News reports:

• Home to more foreclosures than 47 U.S. states, Florida sought to clear out its backlog with a system of special court hearings that dispensed with cases quickly, sometimes in less than a minute.

• Homeowners like Nicole West now threaten to slow that system, Florida’s so-called rocket docket, to a crawl. West, who has been fighting to save her Jensen Beach house from foreclosure, has leveled a new allegation in her three-year battle: the entire process is based on fraud. [...] The banks said they are investigating homeowner charges like West’s that signatures were forged and documents were backdated.

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• Four employees of Lender Processing Services signed assignments transferring West’s mortgage, according to an affidavit submitted on her behalf by Lynn Szymoniak, a West Palm Beach attorney. They signed the documents as officers of American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc. and Option One Mortgage Corp. even though they were actually employed by Lender Processing Services, according to Szymoniak’s affidavit.

• These assignments were signed and notarized more than a year after Deutsche Bank filed the foreclosure suit. For that reason, the Wests question whether the bank has the legal right to file a lawsuit seeking foreclosure. [... M]ichelle Kersch, Jacksonville-based Lender Processing’s spokeswoman, said in a statement that its subsidiary, Docx, executed the documents and that “it had proper authority and review processes in place.”

For the story, see Florida's 30-Second Foreclosure Dash Hits Wall of Fraud Claims.