So I was doing my daily perusal of the bowels of the internets and came up with this little gem.
Mortgage Fraud Assessment – Florida Department of Law Enforcement FDLE 2005 (see below)
It was mentioned in this article from the Herald Tribune…
Flipping fraud ignored by police and prosecutors
–In 2005, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement issued a report to law enforcement officials and prosecutors warning of a cataclysmic rise in mortgage fraud. Even so, most law enforcement agencies, including those in Manatee and Sarasota counties, ignored FDLE’s most basic recommendations.
–While the FBI has recently devoted more manpower to mortgage fraud, most local law enforcement agencies have not. Most Florida police departments and sheriff’s offices have no detectives dedicated to mortgage fraud. Many do not even have detectives trained to pursue such cases. Meanwhile, the FBI is pursuing about 2,500 mortgage fraud cases nationwide, a tiny fraction of the fraud that was committed.
-In some counties, victims of real estate fraud schemes were rebuffed when they sought help from local law enforcement. At the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office, a half-dozen people said they tried to report fraud but deputies would not even write up an incident report. In at least one case, multiple victims reported a fraud to multiple agencies, including the Sarasota County Sheriff. No one investigated.
–Until recently, no one at the state level coordinated the response of the various agencies that regulate mortgage fraud and the real estate industry. Complaints to one agency were not necessarily shared with other agencies that could have investigated or might have received complaints about the same schemes.
—Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum made no attempt to coordinate mortgage fraud response among local law enforcement until April, a few days after the Herald-Tribune called McCollum to get his reaction to the newspaper’s findings. That month, McCollum held his first mortgage fraud conference call with representatives from local law enforcement and state regulatory agencies. He called the mortgage fraud crisis a “state of emergency” and said there needed to be better coordination among agencies.
–For years, McCollum’s office had been collecting complaints and referring cases to local law enforcement agencies — police departments and sheriff’s offices whose detectives had no training to go after mortgage fraud.
In sober language, a 36-page Florida Department of Law Enforcement report explained that banks would collapse and losses would be counted in “hundreds of billions of dollars.”
The level of fraud would rival the Enron case and the Savings and Loan collapse of the 1980s, the intelligence report warned.
The report, which was not released to the public but was sent to prosecutors and law enforcement officials across the state, laid out a series of responses to help prevent or lessen the disaster.
But instead of heeding the warning, most law enforcement officials — including Earl Moreland, the elected state attorney for Sarasota and Manatee counties, and Bill Balkwill, Sarasota County’s sheriff at the time — did nothing.
“Mortgage fraud is so complex, and there are so many scams,” Davis said. “A lot of the fraud is going to be the insiders. They’re going to manipulate the system.”
And all this time I thought it was the scumbag deadbeat homeowners that took down the ENTIRE financial industry!!!
4closureFraud
https://4closurefraud.org/
The report below is a look into the past on what was KNOWN. It amazes me that so little was done to prevent our demise…
wish I had known about this in October, when they did my husbands depo. the attorney asked him why he didn’t go to the “authorities” and report it when we found out about the fraud and why did we continue to pay the mortgage when we “knew” there were forgories. My husband did reply that we did not know about the forgories nor all the fraud that took place with our loan until we received our notice to foreclose (which he reminded her was hand delivered to our door by her employer). At which time we went searching for answers and attorneys.
Had we had this report he could have tossed it across the table and asked her: “but Mame do you really think it would have mattered or helped?”