pat the rat

I must comment that Lynn E Szymoniak has done some pretty thorough investigative work.
At her website, http://www.frauddigest.com, is a very good post about Christopher Peterson entitled “in roads on foreclosure fraud by mortgage servicers.”

One question here , robo-signers, well documented, seem to work in various state’s simultaneously, would they be required to file income statements in the various juristictions/states that they were employed in at the time they signed documents?

Dear Tony:

Thank you very much for your excellent article on MERS.

One of the significant problems with MERS (and there are many problems as you pointed out) is that MERS has no controls regarding who may sign a document as a MERS officer.

The documents signed by MERS officers are critically important to prove home ownership – and judges assume (wrongly) that a vice president of MERS would have the same training, experience and knowledge as the officer of a major corporation, but nothing could be further from the truth. The individuals signing as MERS officers most often work for document mills. Their sole responsibility is to sign thousands of documents a day. They do not have time to read these documents or even have access to the files to determine whether the information is correct. They are clerical office workers pumping out documents to replace the essential documents that have been lost (or never obtained) by the mortgage companies and securities companies in the rush to make mortgage-backed securitized trusts to sell to investors.

Take, for example, Mortgage Assignments signed by Liquenda Allotey. In the course of less than three years, Mr. Allotey signed over 100,000 Mortgage Assignments using the following titles:

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. as nominee for American Home Mortgage Acceptance, Inc.

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. as nominee for CTX Mortgage Company, LLC

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. as nominee for Decision One Mortgage Company

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. as nominee for EMC Mortgage Corp.

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. as nominee for Entrust Mortgage, Inc.

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc, as nominee for First National Bank of Arizona

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. as nominee for Freemont Investment & Loan

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. as nominee for Greenpoint Mortgage Funding, Inc.

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. as nominee for Market Street Mortgage Corporation

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. as nominee for Southstar Funding, LLC

Vice President, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. as nominee for Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp.

Attorney In Fact for Novastar Mortgage

Attorney in Fact, JP Morgan Chase Bank, National Association, as Successor-in-Interest to Washington Mutual Bank,
as Successor-in-Interest to Long Beach Mortgage Company.

All of these documents were notarized in Dakota County, Minnesota. A telephone call to the Dakota County, Minnesota offices of Lender Processing Services, Inc. will confirm that Allotey is employed there.

Lender Processing Services, Inc. is a Fortune 500 company with headquarters in Jacksonville, Florida that provides “mortgage default management services” to over 50 major banks. These banks act as Trustees for the mortgage-backed trusts that bought the residential mortgages that were turned into securities, especially in the last five years. Among its other services, LPS promises banks and mortgage companies that it will “draft missing documents.”

If a forecloser needs an Assignment to prove ownership of a mortgage, LPS will provide such a document, signed by Liquenda Allotey and notarized by yet another LPS employee. The document will more often than not have false information regarding the date the trust acquired the property, the previous owner, and other essential information. Moreover, LPS when providing such documents is working for the banks (the GRANTEES) but signing on behalf of the original lenders, through the fiction of MERS. No disclosure is made to the Courts of any of these arrangements.

On thousands of documents, MERS Vice-President Allotey has also signed on behalf of mortgage companies that were long ago dissolved in bankruptcy.

Allotey has even been mentioned in a legal opinion involving conflicting information in mortgage assignments: In re Sima Schwartz, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, District of Massachusetts, Case No. 06-42476- JBR, Memorandum of Decision on Motion for Relief, Document 84, Entered 4-19-2007. (“There are two documents captioned “Assignment of Mortgage” among the papers provided to the Court.5 The earlier of the two is an assignment dated May 23, 2006 pursuant to which MERS as nominee for First NLC assigned its or First NLC’s
interest in the mortgage to Deutsche. The document is “signed”6 by a vice president of MERS. Interestingly this document was attached to the Debtor’s submissions. A duplicate copy is not to be found in among Deutsche’s papers. Instead Deutsche submitted an assignment of mortgage that was dated June 14, 2006 and signed by John A. Dunnery whom the assignment identifies as a vice president of MERS.”
(In a footnote, Judge Rosenthal states: The signature appears to be little more than a very large check mark attached to a downward line. A stamp of the individual’s name and title identifies the signor as Liquenda Allotey, a vice president of MERS.) (opinion attached).

In my opinion, the conduct of these foreclosure mills is garden-variety fraud. Courts and prosecutors need to wake-up.

Best regards,

Lynn E. Szymoniak, Editor, Fraud Digest (www.frauddigest.com)