Zombie Foreclosures are Bank Fraud

Gingo and Orth Law posted: “Helpful Links_Fall 2013” with a collection of links to zombie foreclosure stuff (a few of which are links to me). Thanks for the links. The post refers to the recent Zombie Florida Foreclosure article and my zombielaw post about it.

It also links to LivingLies webblog: “Zombie Properties: Banks Don’t Want the Money, Don’t Want the Property: They Just Want Foreclosure Sale and Deed” by Neil F. Garfield, M.B.A., J.D., who reiterates some of what I have been writing and says it even stronger:

The borrowers are for the most part willing to straighten this mess out if approached with fair terms that reinstate their credit and reinstate or create loans that are free from the myriad of defects in the falsely claimed securitization chains. The intermediate banks don’t want that because they would be facing liability for trillions of dollars they collected through fraud, deceit and identity theft.

Garfield refers to Ponzi schemes (a classic zombie scam) and explains three types of zombie foreclosure:

Zombie Properties got their name from being in a state of limbo. Broadly characterized, they include first homes abandoned my misinformed homeowners who believed their home was subject to a legitimate foreclosure. Second they include properties subject to foreclosures but where the bank has put off getting the final judgment or put off the sale. And third they include properties in which the foreclosure sale has occurred but the property was abandoned by the Banks.

Recall similarly ZombieLaw: Three types of Zombie Debt.

Garfield continues:

Why do we have a pandemic of zombies and foreclosures when so many homeowners are actually eager to sign new document that would clear up the title problems caused by MERS, improper disclosure at closing as to who the lender was, claims of fraud, predatory lending deceptive lending etc.?

In the law we say look to the result to determine the intention.

Another of Gingo and Orth Law’s Helpful Links is “The double dipping docket_paying out on defaulted mortgages” by Susan Chana Lask, Esq:

consistent with the facts of most foreclosure cases between the “too big to fail” banks and the homeowners is the fact that the banks created this system of selling mortgages knowing homeowners would default then banks refuse to workout loans and communicate with homeowners before and during their foreclosure filings. My position is that if the banks want to profit from the plight they caused homeowners when they created MERS[1] and all their layers of protection with PSAs and MBS’ filed with the SEC then the banks better stop the BS and prove their case with more than shoddy and fictional mass produced foreclosure documents.

And in some cases the banks ourightly induced the default with false promises of negotiations.