The Many Ways Banks Commit Criminal Fraud

Zero Hedge ^ | 7/3/12 | George Washington

[Kartographer]

The Libor scandal seems to be waking people up to manipulation and fraud by the big banks.

There are many other types of fraud they’ve engaged in as well …

Here is a partial list:

Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments.

Laundering money for drug cartels.

Cooking their books

Engaging in unlawful “frontrunning” to manipulate markets.

Engaging in unlawful “Wash Trades” to manipulate asset prices.

Otherwise manipulating markets.

Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details here,

Committing massive and pervasive fraud both when they initiated mortgage loans and when they foreclosed on them (and see this)

Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers.

Cheating homeowners – especially veterans – from laws meant to protect people from unfair foreclosure

Bribing and bullying ratings agencies to inflate ratings on their risky investments

Singing the glories of investments which they knew were terrible, and then betting against the same investments to make money for themselves.

Participating in various Ponzi schemes. s

Owning and largely running the Federal Reserve … which is itself arguably a Ponzi scheme

[Kartographer]

How much do you want to bet NO ONE goes to jail? I've caught flak before and have been call a communist and worse for saying this, but the corner three card Monte dealer is more honest than most of the ‘Too Big to Fail’ banks and investment houses. And face it the Monte dealer who ‘scams’ a few hundred is a thousand times more likely to go to jail that the ‘banksters’ that are stealing millions.

[Kartographer]

PING!

[who_would_fardels_bear]

Thanks for keeping up the drum beat.

There are people that make money making things or providing real and useful services.

And then there are the human scum who live off the rigged betting on the work of others.

California just passed a law to provide basic protections to homeowners. The shill for the banks was given a chance to blast the bill, but all he could do was blather on about how the bill would make banks more reluctant to make home loans.

[freeandfreezing]

I'll add a couple more:

1) Subverting existing state anti-usury laws to enable the charging of usurious interest rates.

2) Avoiding anti-trust price fixing laws by establishing a pricing scheme based on credit scores which depend on factors solely controlled by the banks and then manipulating the credit scores of their customers so they can charge higher prices - and since the whole industry colludes to use the same price setting information, consumers cannot shop for a better price.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!