Posted on 08/18/2018 9:26:18 AM PDT by RideForever
Today, during a deposition of the designated representative of the Bank of New York as Trustee for a Countrywide CWMBS securitization, the representative (who is an attorney and employee of the servicer Shellpoint) admitted under oath that MERS is not the true beneficiary of a Deed of Trust (DOT) despite claiming to do so, as the Beneficiary is the lender and MERS is not and was never the lender. The representative also admitted that the Substitution of Trustee filed by a law Firm and signed by Shellpoint (as a dba of New Penn Financial) contained a false statement that the Note was payable to MERS. The representative further admitted that two letters sent to the homeowner which stated that the loan was owned by a CWALT Trust were also incorrect.
As those of you who follow this website know, the Supreme Courts of Oregon, Washington, and Montana issued opinions that MERS is not the beneficiary of a DOT despite claiming to be so, and the Washington case even permitted MERS to be sued for misrepresenting that it is the beneficiary. Today’s testimony is in line with these decisions. As MERS is not the beneficiary, it cannot act as such for purposes of executing Assignments of Deeds of Trust or Substitutions of Trustee in non-judicial foreclosure cases.
The homeowner is represented by Jeff Barnes, Esq. of W.J. Barnes, P.A. Mr. Barnes took the deposition of the representative this afternoon in Nashville, TN.
Not a lawyer, so maybe a stupid question.
Does this automatically propagate to other states, or do we have to fight the battle state by state?
Oh, come on. It’s all explained in the headline. /s
MERS was a mechanism to facilitate the transfer and service of these loans.
This came about because none of banks, etc wanted to hold sub prime mortgages. So a method of packaging all mortgages was developed to sell these sub prime mortgages. A fast and efficient method of transfer and servicing was needed due to the large number of mortgages being sold and resold.
Only problem the MERS system was not recognized by the laws covering mortgages, so the ownership of the loans was impossible to determine under MERS. Hard to sue to collect money on a mortgage you cannot legally prove you own!
Talk about putting the cart before the horse! All that was needed was to pass laws addressing MERS.
Does this automatically propagate to other states, or do we have to fight the battle state by state?
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The states have variances in their real estate recording laws. An underlying law is that all documents relative to recording events to real property have to be over a signature of the note owner or the beneficiary-designated trustee. The Statute of Frauds is the legal principle requiring signatures for certain legal documents, and likely varies as to the actual document types named among the states. I haven’t seen a case yet where this statutes was used to beat the ‘agent of an agent of a nominee (MERS)’ that is found in so many cases, and the instructions affecting title from the actual beneficiary were presented over a signature, in violation of the statute of frauds (CA is my example)
Wrongo! A person has to know that they are making the payment to the proper holder of the mortgage. If you owe Bob’s Bank for your mortgage, but you pay Mo Rosenfeld, there is no guarantee that your mortgage will ever be paid.
MERS acted to hide Mo’s name and address, so that your whole purchase of a home could be screwed up. PLUS, if your house declined to 50% of value, there is a chance that Bob’s Bank would prefer you refinancing at 60%, rather than lose it all. But MERS keeps you from know who the Mortgagee is.
You are left to deal with a servicing agent, who makes more money foreclosing you, than working out a better deal for the Mortgagee.
Everybody loses. Not to mention, every county that didn’t get their tax/fee when mortgages were transferred.
The Western System of recording property ownership is so ingrained and vital, that even the Nazis had to provide for how Dead Jews could transfer property down at the courthouse.
Mortgage Electronic Registration System.
Wall St. funny money and foreign investors destroyed the mortgage markets in late 2000s after underwriting standards were tossed aside.
62 million homes had MERS written into their mortgage loans. When the mortgage collapse was caused by Fannie Mae (Fannie Mae behind 80% of mortgage market pulled plug in late 2008), there were tens of millions of homeowners making payments needing to refi 5-year resets who suddenly could not find their lender or servicer. Some homeowners were set to repay their entire loan before their mortgages were to trigger a 5-year reset to a much higher interest rate, and Fannie Mae slammed the door on them or their lender/servicer upped and disappeared.
This fiasco was all staged, planned. MERS was a database with a handful of employees. Crooked attorneys would present to MERS certain documents stating that a new servicer had taken over for the old on and present a letter appointing them to collect. The crooks would be granted access to the MERS database and assign themselves the real estate, then initiate foreclosure.
MERS was designed to track bundled notes and mortgage pools so that underlying security assets could be tracked as Wall St bundled mortgages together and sold them as mortgage bonds. Wall St. greed got in the way of keeping a clean and legal operation. MERS got into trouble when it allowed crooks to access its database and assign whatever fraudulent documents it needed to rob homeowners and then came into a tsunami of lawsuits when it was found that mortgage assignments were never recorded at the county level.
When you have $250 million, $500 million, $750 million in mortgage bond proceeds with credits, tax credits, and default insurance payments transferred to an offshore trust in the name of a shell company that you set up in Cayman, are you really concerned about some effing pissant state statutes? You’re hidden, no one will ever know, and you are now a prospect to join the global wealthy elite. Piss on statutes! You are too big to fail, too big to get caught, and you can hire an army of attorneys to wear down financially any pissant homeowner who tries to fight you in court.
This goes very deep into a lot of criminality and scams. Billions were paid to Obama appointees in settlements which were then sent to Obama cronies. A characterization of the entire matter can be stated in terms of an open season on American homeowners, a war waged against the mortgage markets, the biggest heist in history according to lawyers who entered the devastating aftermath.
Let me give you an example: I will play a mortgage crook. I was hired with a high school education to robosign documents to make it seem my company was an owner of real estate that was part of a mortgage pool sold with a mortgage bond (fraud on title). I am told I am a ‘Vice-President’, an officer of the Company. It doesn’t matter that the corporate documents are hidden behind layers and layers of subsidiaries and that my name does not appear anywhere in them. For now, I have a letter saying I am a VP and an officer of the company. I approach MERS, get a password and proceed to download tens of thousands of homes in default that were obtained from a list marketed by a group of crooked lawyers operating as ‘Lender Processing Services’ later changing its name to ‘Black Knight’ (look it up). Over a year I learn the scam and ask for a bigger cut. They put me in charge of going after homeowners.
Attempts by homeowners to cure default or challenge title issues in court are stymied because my parent organization of crooks has Congressional offices bribed to look the other way and courts are stacked with judges to accede to the ‘lender’. I have free reign to scoop up homes for free as most homeowners walk away. Some homeowners win but we settle out of court so that it never gets into the news.
MERS opened the door for me to do all this by assigning me as beneficiary.
It doesn’t matter that MERS was set up by Bank of America Securities, a notorious mafia-infested hedge fund raking in billions of ill-gotten gains.
I am now wealthy, untouchable, and could care less about you pissant homeowners and your stupid homes and lives, Besides, it was all the fault of the Community Reinvestment Act.
I for one refuse to undergo Hydra-Shok therapy.
I recall that a number of people got awarded their houses when they contested foreclosures and the forecloser could not produce the mortgage agreement because it had disappeared into the securitization process. My daughter got hers because the bank did not want to bare itself to lawsuit because of the same thing so it found that there had been a “mistake” and signed the house back to here completely while returning her two most recent payments.
State by state. All states have their own laws governing these matters.
Some cases are tried in federal court and have binding rulings on all states but in 99% of the cases that look like they will be won by the homeowner, the crooked debt collectors will offer to settle out of court in favor of the homeowner on condition that the settlement be kept confidential. This is done to hide the ‘wins’ so that people won’t know what methods are used to defeat the crooks.
Also, as many judges are effectively held hostage to statutes written to favor ‘lenders’, a homeowner with a competent attorney firm will demand a jury trial because juries can bring verdicts apart from statutes even though a judge or debt collector will go to hell and back telling them they must regard the statutes.
Courts and their lawyer communities have at the core of their business models a game of messing around with statutes. Juries can bypass all that game playing.
Another tactic used by crooked debt collectors is to have their attorneys motion to dismiss a lawsuit or a motion for summary judgment, why? Because they want to avoid a homeowner getting into discovery and finding out that yes, indeed, the debt collectors are crooks, frauds. If the homeowner survives a motion to dismiss or motion for summary judgment and starts finding out the truth about fraud on title, IT’S SETTLEMENT TIME WITH CONFIDENTIALITY AS A PRIME CONDITION!
This is how the game is played.
You should know something about the subject before you make ignorant comments. Or not, maybe you like to play the fool.
Except the guy that is going for the free house.
A person has to know that they are making the payment to the proper holder of the mortgage.
No, the person has to make the payment to the servicer (agent) for the note owner.
Three part test:
Did they sign the note?
Did they Get the money?
Did they pay it back?
If the answer to all 3 is yes, and they try to keep the house for free, then they are deadbeats and they get no sympathy from me.
When servicing is transferred (which isn't really that common) one gets a notice from the old servicer and one from the new.
The obligation is to pay the note, not the mortgage. There mortgage is merely collateral.
As to the county clerks not getting their cut, HARRIS COUNTY TEXAS v. MERSCORP INCORPORATED, , (5th Cir. 2015) https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-5th-circuit/1706183.html
Although some courts have approved charging MERS a higher recording fee.
You might want to also look at Martins v. BAC Home Loans Servicing, L.P., 722 F.3d 249, 254 (5th Cir.2013)
And since you are looking at the 9th Circuit, here's the 9th Circuit multidistrict litigation opinion. http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2014/06/12/11-17615.pdf
How many foreclosure packages have you reviewed and written legal opinions on?
Two sides of the Moral Hazard.
1. Some, not all, homeowners trying to get a free house. Those attempting to do this are few in number. Most want to refi or resume payments to someone authorized to receive payments.
2. Crooked lawyers and debt collectors posing as ‘lenders’ trying to get a free house via foreclosure. Most foreclosures are wrongful because most homes were converted to MERS loans with teaser rates and bundled into security instruments sold and traded as mortgage bonds.
When the mortgage bonds collapsed, default insurers settled claims by investors, thus leaving millions of ‘stranded unclaimed defaults’.
Scavengers made and sold lists of stranded defaults to crooked attorney firms who fraudulently signed themselves real estate they had no skin in the game to begin with. They foreclosed on millions of homeowners many who were not in default but were told they would have to miss 3 months of payments in order to get a loan mod. Then once the homeowners were in default, the crooks would foreclose.
All thanks to the Obama Administration which focused on raking in tens of billions from crooked banks in mortgage settlements and then using the proceeds not to help homeowners and mortgage markets but to enrich their cronies. Rather than send crooked banks and attorneys to jail, Obama declared open season on homeowners leading to the destruction of countless lives and families.
Obama’s got it coming, Karma is a bitch.
Want to see something really scary?
http://www.consumercr.com/en/us-bankruptcy.aspx
“Federal Judge Rules: MERS Mortgage Transfers are Illegal”
I'm unimpressed. I've followed this for a few years. There are plenty of people who have made all their payments and either find themselves in very expensive wrongful foreclosure proceedings or can't get a clean clear title once they have paid the note off. And I've also met more than a few incompetent lawyers.
https://www.mers-servicerid.org/sis/
MERS ServicerID. Enter mortgage i.d. number or property address to identify the servicer associated with a mortgage loan registered on the MERS system.
I thought it was a flesh eating bacteria. Hmmph.
It is.
No, no, that’s MRSA.
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