A lawsuit settled in Florida last week reveals that banks and financial institutions stole
trillions of dollars worth of homes through fraudulent mortgages, wrongful foreclosures, and coverups designed to hide their activity.
From the article in Salon:
The 2011 lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in both North and South Carolina, by a white-collar fraud specialist named Lynn Szymoniak, on behalf of the federal government, 17 states and three cities. Twenty-eight banks, mortgage servicers and document processing companies are named in the lawsuit, including mega-banks like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi and Bank of America...
...By the end of 2009, private mortgage-backed securities trusts held one-third of all residential mortgages in the U.S. That means that tens of millions of home mortgages worth trillions of dollars have no legitimate underlying owner that can establish the right to foreclose. This hasn’t stopped banks from foreclosing anyway with false documents, and they are often successful, a testament to the breakdown of law in the judicial system. But to this day, the resulting chaos in disentangling ownership harms homeowners trying to sell these properties, as well as those trying to purchase them. And it renders some properties impossible to sell.
I wrote a
diary back in May of last year pointing out the effects this scam had on voter eligibility, on state and local budgets, and on the economy as a whole. It was election time then, and my emphasis was on encouraging people to vote, but I think any homeowner who has lost a home or who is losing a home to foreclosure should take heart from this latest disclosure and
fight these banks every step of the way.