LPS

Former Lender Processing Executive Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison

A former Lender Processing Services Inc. (LPS) executive was sentenced to five years in prison for her role in a six-year mortgage forgery scheme, the Department of Justice said.

Lorraine Brown, 56, pleaded guilty in November to a scheme to prepare and file more than one million fraudulently signed and notarized mortgage-related documents. She was sentenced Tuesday by Senior U.S. District Judge Henry Lee Adams Jr. in the Middle District of Florida. In addition to her prison term, Ms. Brown also was sentenced to serve two years of supervised release and ordered to pay a fine of $15,000.

Ms. Brown served as the chief executive of DocX LLC, an LPS subsidiary that prepared and recorded mortgage-related documents, including assignments needed to show ownership of loans in foreclosures. DocX closed down in early 2010.

According to the plea agreement, DocX employees, at the direction of Ms. Brown and others, began forging and falsifying signatures of authorized personnel on the mortgage-related documents that they had been hired to prepare and file with property recorders’ offices. The documents were fraudulently notarized as if actually executed by authorized DocX employees, the DOJ said.

According to plea documents, Ms. Brown implemented these signing practices at DocX to generate greater profit. The unit was able to create and execute larger volumes of documents using these signing and notarization practices and also hired temporary workers who worked for lower costs to act as authorized signers. Between 2003 and 2009, DocX generated approximately $60 million in gross revenue.

Rest from the Wall Street Journal here…

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