Mortgage Fraud Indicators

Are your mortgage notes originals or reproductions resulting in posible mortgage fraud?

Are the signatures on your mortgage notes legitimate?

Mortgage fraud has become an epidemic across the United States. Since the collapse of the real estate market in 2008, many borrowers found themselves in trouble with their loans. In many instances banks informed homeowners they were in default on their loans. When the lender as asked to produce original loan documents in order to prove they had legal capacity to foreclose on the property, the banks were unable to produce the original loan documents.

If you suspect there is potential mortgage fraud with the mortgage documents hire an attorney who specializes in mortgage fraud. You may also want to hire a mortgage fraud auditor who has extensive experience in the subject. It is best to hire an attorney before you hire a document examiner.

The state of Florida defines mortgage fraud in its statutes.

Photocopied documents

Many original documents were scanned then shredded or otherwise destroyed. In many cases when a trained forensic document examiner carefully examines the documents produced, it is clear they are photocopies rather than originals. This is an indication of possible mortgage fraud. The quality of the photocopies is often such that the untrained eye will not see the deception.

Robo signing

Companies such as DocX were in the business of hiring lowly paid workers to sit in a room and sign the name of an alleged bank officer onto loan documents. In many cases this alleged officer was the officer at many banks at the same time. The signatures are obviously written by different people. According to www.protitleusa.com there are more than 808 robo-signers. In November 2012 the founder and CEO of DocX pleaded guilty for mortgage fraud including falsifying more than one million documents including false notaries and fraudulent signatures and was sentenced to 60 months in prison.

Rubber stamp signatures

In some instances the signatures were applied with a rubber stamp. In this case the “signature” of the bank officer was part of a rubber stamp rather than a true signature. The client hired me to determine the name of the person who “signed” the loan document because the “signature” was too light to read by looking at the document. Using Adobe Photoshop I was able to enhance the image and discover the name of the signer.

Non-authentic signatures on the loan documents

Due to privacy concerns an example image is not shown for this section. Recently I had a case where a bank claimed to hold a loan agreement for a customer at 5.25%. The customer had a copy of the loan document at 4.25% interest rate. When the signature on the bank’s loan document was examined and compared with known signatures from the client written at approximately the same time, the signature on the bank’s loan document was not written by the borrower.