In the old days Police Departments had a Bunco Squad who chased after low level con men. If you had a complaint against a fortune teller, or anyone else, who tricked you out of money they could be charged with theft by deception. If it was a banker, or non street level crook, who would be hard to prosecute, they would tell you that it was a CIVIL MATTER, and so you should sue them.
Around 2005 or 2006 the Sarasota Herald Tribune published a string of stories about Neal Husani, who was in the business of buy property selling it, on paper, to others at higher prices, and getting loans based on the now higher price of the property. They also used pet appraisers who would help them pump up the price…
Since the housing boom was going on the Bankers ignored the idea that these values could not reasonably double over a 24 hour period. When properties got harder to sell and there were a number of default on mortgages these banker decided to bundle them up, and sell the mortgages to some other schmuck.
They called them Derivatives, and sold the to others.
What happened is that once, the properties quit selling, and there was a rash of defaults where the bankers were losing money, they began to figure out they had been defrauded. Never mind the fact that they did not pay enough attention, wink wink, to see that there was no REAL reason that these values would increase, double or triple, over such a short time, often in just the space of time it took to sign an agreement. They had been victims of fraud…. That was when the Law Enforcement people took more interest in people like Neal Husani, and he headed for the hills to leave his co-conspirators to get nabbed by the authorities, who had been alerted to this earlier, though they had taken little interest at the time, by papers such as the Herald-Tribune.
Soon after that some of the banks sent people out to teach the various departments how to detect borrowers who had made fraudulent claims on their documents. Never mind that these people, now teaching others how to decide fraud, could NOT figure it out when it was convenient to look the other way. Oh no! Now they decide it was a crime on the part of these terrible flippers who took advantage of their greed and the booming housing market to make lots of money and leave a dead mortgage behind.
So now there were a lot of pieces of paper, mortgages, that represented more than the actual value of the property, being passed around. Documents that represented an investment opportunity for various organizations, such as pension funds.
When the brown stuff started to be thrown around by the huge fan many people found that the banks were clamping down on their credit, calling back their loans, and eventually asking the feds for money to shore up their mistakes, read this GREED.
When the foreclosures really started it was papers, such as the Herald Tribune, who started to question the legality of the foreclosures, as well as the legitimacy of the documents filed in them.
Some of the Judges involved in these cases began to notice that, as the foreclosures increased in volume, that some documents were not correctly filled out. Yet, instead of taking more time to verify that the document were correct they started what was called Rocket Dockets where dozens of cases could be adjudicated each day if no one showed up to dispute the claim. This brought out cases where home owners had not even been told that their case was before the court, and a number of people found themselves being force out of their homes while the bank said it was trying to help them stay in it.
After awhile it got so bad, the publicity, that some of the Judges decided that they would hold the lawyers responsible for inaccurate court filings, or not showing up for the court date. This was a switch from the homeowner losing his house, due to not knowing he was supposed to appear, and the lawyers were incensed that they would be held to account for NOT TELLING the TRUTH.. Imagine that!
The banks, and other financial groups, got money so they would not fail but, NOT SO the homeowner who lost their job, and then their house, due to the greed of the money lenders. Can we say “Biblical”?
Law Firms got in trouble for telling LIES on their court documents, and thought this was terrible.
Several years have passed since this all started. The economy is in shambles and people are still losing homes. Home sales is only now starting to rise, and then we hear that the flippers are at it again.
The banks are still greedy, even going so far as to begin charging fees for services that had been free, and getting tough with fines if your accounts gets short, and yet they do just what they have been doing.
And we still have the flippers.
So, who are the crooks?
That Joe Guy 