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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – California Attorney General Jerry Brown on Friday called on lenders to halt foreclosures in the state, following recent disclosures of problems with legal documentation in home seizures. Earlier on Friday, Bank of America Corp became the first lender to suspend foreclosures across the U.S. Brown, who is running for governor of the nation's most populous state, had previously called on GMAC and JPMorgan Chase and Co to suspend foreclosures after they disclosed problems with its legal documentation in home seizures. "Bank of America has taken an important step, and the other major lenders should follow its...

Wake up and good morning. We may not have high-speed rail (yet), but the stop-the-foreclosure-fiasco bullet train is leaving the station. Suddenly, everybody's decided to recognize (or should I say confess) that the foreclosure legal process in Florida and increasingly in other states has fallen off the tracks, imperiling clear title home ownership in the country and endangering our economic recovery. We reported extensively about this in a St. Petersburg Times Sunday column here and in a follow-up Venture blog posting here on Monday. The core of the issue? A foreclosure freeze is taking hold now that more people in...

Attorney General Eric Holder says the government is looking into allegations that mortgage lenders in the foreclosure crisis have been evicting homeowners using flawed court papers. At a news conference, the attorney general said the Justice Department is aware of the accusations that have surfaced and that the government is examining them.

Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray announced a lawsuit Wednesday against GMAC Mortgage LLC and its parent Ally Financial Inc., accusing the loan servicer of filing fraudulent documents "to mislead courts in hundreds of Ohio foreclosures."

Txas Attorney General Greg Abbott called for a halt on foreclosures Monday amid nationwide scrutiny over the way they are processed. Notices to suspend foreclosures were sent to 27 loan servicers doing business in Texas, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, the attorney general's office said. It did not have the full list of companies available late Monday. The office also called for a halt on the sales of properties previously foreclosed upon, which might affect auctions scheduled today, and on evictions of people living in such properties.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Zoe Lofgren and other California Democrats are calling for a federal investigation into the processing of thousands of foreclosures by some of the nation's largest mortgage lenders. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke and U.S. Comptroller John Dugan, the lawmakers said recent reports that Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and Ally Financial may have improperly approved thousands of foreclosures "amplify our concerns that systemic problems exist."

This is how we should resolve this. •For each and every loan that was not properly conveyed into the MBS trusts and cannot be proved to have been properly conveyed, the purchasers of such MBS have every right to sue the banks that created these MBS for fraud. They received a representation and warranty that the deeds and notes were taken in good recordable form. They were not. This is fraud - period - which entitles them to force the bank involved to either fix the problem (if it can) or buy back the MBS at par. They should immediately...

The nation's overburdened foreclosure system is riddled with faked documents, forged signatures and lenders who take shortcuts reviewing borrower's files, according to court documents and interviews with attorneys, housing advocates and company officials. The problems, which are so widespread that some judges approving the foreclosures ignore them, are coming to light after Ally Financial, the country's fourth-biggest mortgage lender, halted home evictions in 23 states this week.

**** CNBC breaking news , JP Morgan has announced that they have the same problem with their foreclosure processing as GMAC announced recently.. namely that their paperwork is done "assembly line" style and that the sworn affirmations on the docs mean absolutely nothing as the signers have no direct knowledge of the accounts they are signing off on... Fraud on the courts quite literally a million times over.. **** People if you're buying ANY real property that has been bought or sold any time in the prior 15 years PLEASE PLEASE buy a title insurance police with YOU as the...

[snip] "If this does go to the next level (i.e. national foreclosure moratorium, fear that hundreds of thousands of foreclosures have been performed illegally, etc.), the unintended negative consequences on the mortgage market, MBS investors, banks' balance sheets and ultimately the housing market will be significant. " We're already seeing threats of ratings agency downgrades on all the major servicers, not to mention the threat to housing's overall recovery. If the bulk of these cases are valid, then delaying them is only going to prolong the pain. "Worst case is that the current foreclosure problems turn out to be industry-wide...

A top federal bank regulator said Thursday that he has directed seven of the nation's largest lenders to review their foreclosure processes after learning about the widespread mishandling of homeowner evictions by the industry. John Walsh, acting director of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, told lawmakers during a hearing on the financial regulatory overhaul enacted this summer that some lenders "clearly had deficiencies" in their system for foreclosures. The banks contacted by regulators include J.P. Morgan Chase, which announced Wednesday that it was freezing 56,000 foreclosures after finding errors in its preparation of documents, according to OCC...

Bank of America has outdone itself yet again. The irresponsible foreclosure practices of banks have been in the headlines. Employees of both GMAC and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) have admitted to signing off on foreclosure documents without actually having read them. The reports have led to renewed questions about the banks' foreclosure practices. But as usual, the no holds barred winner in the irresponsible bank tricks department is BofA (BAC). The bank recently foreclosed on a Florida property that doesn't even have a mortgage, the Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale reported. The foreclosure was started in 2008 by Countrywide, the notorious...

See, without standing they can't foreclose, but then we get back to "who can?" And what we find is that the originator was paid, and thus they can't either. Worse, for those originators that are bankrupt, their "assets", such as they are, can't go anywhere without a bankruptcy trustee's signature, and further, even if someone was to acquire that, which nobody has, THE REMICs CAN'T TAKE THE PAPER ANYWAY AS THEIR CLOSING DATE HAS EXPIRED. So we have a bankrupt originator who was paid in full and can't foreclose, and we have a note that can't be transferred into the...

There's no polite way to put this. A growing cancer is infecting the backlogged legal process of foreclosing on hundreds of thousands of homes in Florida. It's endangering the legal and economic stability of this state. And it's exposing an appalling lack of leadership, first for allowing such a breakdown in the legal system and, now, for failing to own up to this mess and get it fixed. How bad is it? Laws governing who actually owns a foreclosed home are becoming so suspect a new buzzword is emerging: blighted titles. Even the tepid rebound of Florida's economy may face...

As some of the nation’s largest lenders have conceded that their foreclosure procedures might have been improperly handled, lawsuits have revealed myriad missteps in crucial documents. The flawed practices that GMAC Mortgage, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America have recently begun investigating are so prevalent, lawyers and legal experts say, that additional lenders and loan servicers are likely to halt foreclosure proceedings and may have to reconsider past evictions.

Bank of America is delaying foreclosures in 23 states as it examines whether it rushed the foreclosure process for thousands of homeowners without reading the documents. Bank of America isn't able to estimate how many homeowners' cases will be affected, Dan Frahm, a spokesman for the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank, said Friday. The move adds the nation's largest bank to a growing list of mortgage companies whose employees signed documents in foreclosure cases without verifying the information in them. Two other companies, Ally Financial Inc.'s GMAC Mortgage unit and JPMorgan Chase, have halted tens of thousands of foreclosure cases after similar...

Now we got trouble.I am in receipt of a copy of a bulletin from Old Republic Title in which it states: The Company will not insure title to any property which has been foreclosed by Ally Financial, Ally Bank or GMAC until further notice. Oops.I suspect this is going to spread fast, given that this "wee problem" is NOT specific to GMAC and Ally.  In fact, JP Morgan/Chase has reported "similar discrepancies", and then today we had my report on a ruling from a court in which a counterfeit summons was issued not by the court, but by a...

AG attempts to stop foreclosures The Texas Attorney General's office called for a halt on all foreclosures today amid widespread scrutiny over the way foreclosures are processed nationwide. Notices to suspend foreclosures were sent to 27 loan servicers doing business in Texas, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co. The office would not release the list of companies that received notices. The state office also called for a halt on the sales of properties previously foreclosed upon and all evictions of people living in previously foreclosed upon properties. The action is being taken "in an effort to determine...

Citigroup Inc. and Ally Financial Inc. units were sued by homeowners in Kentucky for allegedly conspiring with Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc. to falsely foreclose on loans. The lawsuit, filed as a civil-racketeering class action on behalf all Kentucky homeowners facing foreclosure, also names as a defendant Reston, Virginia-based MERS, the company that handles mortgage transfers among member banks. The suit claims that through MERS the banks are foreclosing on homes even when they don’t hold titles to the properties.

FORWARD OPERATING BASE UBAYDI, Iraq, Dec. 8, 2009 – For the woman he loved, he became a paratrooper in the vaunted 82nd Airborne Division and eventually a U.S. citizen. With his enlistment nearly up, 6-foot, 5-inch, 230-pound Army Spc. Wenderson Jangada is ready to return to his home country of Brazil to reclaim the title of heavyweight boxing champion. Army Spc. Wenderson Jangada mans a machine gun in a guard tower at Forward Operating Base Ubaydi, Iraq, Dec. 5, 2009. A former Brazilian heavyweight champion boxer who became a U.S. citizen just prior to deploying with the 82nd Airborne Division,...