Thursday, November 17, 2011

The Rule of Law

Whoa, this is exciting. David Dayen:
A grand jury in Nevada yesterday indicted two title officers, Gary Trafford and Gerri Sheppard, on 606 counts of robo-signing between 2005 and 2008, a scheme that resulted in the fraudulent filing of tens of thousands of other documents with the Clark County register of deeds. This has the potential to be a groundbreaking case; it’s the first I can think of which actually indicts a robo-signer on criminal charges for fraud. And by going after the title officers, the Attorney General of Nevada, Catherine Cortez Masto, appears to be laying out a strategy to go up the chain and hollow out the entire industry and their illegal document fraud.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the two defendants were employed by Lender Processing Services, the leading foreclosure document processing company in the country, and one under a near-constant state of controversy over the past few years of the foreclosure crisis. In the indictment, Trafford and Sheppard are accused of directing fraudulent notarization and filing of foreclosure documents. This included having their employees forge Trafford and Sheppard’s names on the documents, typically Notices of Default, and then having them notarized. So in addition to a robo-signing scheme, where the notaries and affiants have no underlying knowledge of the documents, this was a forgery scheme. And banks filed these fraudulent documents with the country register of deeds, in violation of existing statutes under Nevada law. These are category C and D felonies, in addition to gross misdemeanors. One woman who worked with Trafford and Sheppard says she signed 25,000 Notices of Default this way.

Understand what was going on. In the interest of speed – and certainly not accuracy – Trafford and Sheppard had other people sign their name on legal documents, notarize them (attesting that the signature was legitimate and the content of which they had no knowledge was legitimate as well), and file them with the register. These are the documents that would be used to kick people out of their homes in Clark County, Nevada, where as many people have been foreclosed upon as anywhere in the country.
Prosecuting mortgage fraud, holy crap!

No comments:

Post a Comment