During the housing boom, lenders passed around mortgages as if they were whiskey bottles at a frat party. Notes were lost, destroyed, sold into multiple pools. Mortgages were not recorded and exorbitant fees were collected by the big firms on Wall Street.

Now that the bubble has burst, “lenders” are trying to collect on loans they do not own, in most cases never lent a dime on the transaction, have no right to, or were paid 30 times over in bailouts, insurance, credit default swaps, etc.

They are doing this because they can. They are steamrolling the courts rocket dockets because hardly anyone is contesting their foreclosures. Think about it. If you could go into a court and file thousands of foreclosures a week, and only a mere 10% challenged the authority of the foreclosing entity, what would you do if you were the greedy bankster?

The crises is even worse in non judicial states…

In almost every case these pretender lenders do not and did not own the loan. Almost all loans during the boom were securitized and it was investors that put up the money. Not the banks.

Now these “pretender lenders” are trying to steal the homes by filing fraudulent assignments, by the thousands, to process the foreclosures.

Don’t believe me? See for you yourself.

http://4closurefraud.wordpress.com/

See also: http://livinglies.wordpress.com/2008/11/29/excellent-article-sumarizing-many-areas-of-foreclosure-litigation/

4closureFraud

Chuck, I agree with your view that only the originator of the loan should have the legal authority to initiate a foreclosure proceeding. Moreover, they should be liable to whoever currently owns of the “mortgage” in whatever shape or form, no matter how opague. The whole financial mess has been created by the front-enders who have had no accountabilty. Banks are the main culprits. Bank executives, greedy morons, deserve only the minimum age, not the millions in salaries and bonuses that they have been getting.

There is still some hope in the legal system that the guilty will be punished.