Federal prosecutors Monday charged 19 individuals, mainly from Southern California, with defrauding homeowners in trouble partly by using “foreclosure rescue pitches” and an equity-draining technique called equity stripping.
Prosecutors said they found victims of the mortgage scam in California, Oregon, Washington state, Nevada and at least 14 other states…
The defendants have been charged with fraud and conspiracy. They could face fines and sentences of as much as 20 years in prison, prosecutors said…
One variation of the alleged fraud…involved adding a so-called investor or “straw buyer” title to a property and requiring homeowners to pay “rent” that was lower than their original monthly mortgage payment. Prosecutors said Charles Head and his associates would sell the home after extracting all available equity.
Homeowners, in the process, lost their property.
You can always count on adversity to bring out the worst in some.
Crooks like these ought to face a FIRING SQUAD !!!
Errr… what about all of the banks that fucked these people in the first place?
It’s alway the petty criminals that pay the price, and are paraded about as an example, purely for show, while the major corporate criminals get away scott free. In fact, the corporate criminals got bailed out this time.
This is such a disgusting country.
I saw this story on the news not long ago. I don’t feel at all sorry for these people.
Should the con artists get the book thrown at them? I think so but I hope nobody bails the victims out or feels sorry for them.
If they couldn’t afford the house, they shouldn’t have purchased it and if they ran into money trouble along the way, they should have sold it when they were unable to make the payments.
No angel is going to swoop in and save you from your huge mortgage payment so if someone stops by making that claim, do some research instead of signing over the deed to your house to a stranger!
As best as I can understand the story “the con” is that distressed owners are talked into SELLING THEIR HOMES to a third party and make rent payments instead of mortgage payments.
Con movies are full of of sayings like “you can’t cheat an honest man” etc. AFTER buying a house they couldn’t afford, some of these victims then entered into another sham deal where they thought they could lie and sell their houses while still keeping them or something of the sort?
NO sympathy at all for these dolts.
Yeah, let’s bail out Long Term Capital Managment, the S&Ls, and Bear Stearns, but fuck everyone else.
The financial institutions who sold these bogus mortgages in the first place should suffer 5x the punishment of these glorified purse-snatchers who are trying to make money off of the big banks’ shenannigans. And the Wall Street scammers who came up with “creative financial instruments” like CDOs, mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, and the like should suffer 10x the punishment.
Too many people making money by shuffling paper and thrashing other people’s accounts.
>>AFTER buying a house they couldn’t afford,
>>some of these victims then entered into
>>another sham deal
I guess you’ve never dealt with a high-pressure salesman, Bobboli?
Plenty of people who qualified for regualar mortgages were pressured into higher-profit sub-prime loans, through the magic of doublespeak and fine print. And now….woops, they’ve done it again.
Now that all the billionaires have been bailed out, somebody needs to start looking after Joe Six Pack.
We’re paying $5000.00/min to conduct the Iraq war. Maybe a couple of cents per minute could be diverted to take care of people who don’t have an MBA from Harvard and a JD from Yale, but who wanted to buy a home for their family?
Fageddabout these purse-snatchters. Give ’em 90 days at the Work Farm. The Big Time Bankers need to do some serious time on the chain gang for the havoc they’ve wreaked on the American economy.
HOLY CRAP!!!!
I think I agree with Mr. Turd!!
#6–MM==Glad to have you back, until you post like this again. Learned nothing in the last few months?
Now lets see==you want to put greedy , stupid bankers in jail for making bad business decisions? Why?
You are painting with too broad a brush, shotgunning where you should be rifling. The “actionable fraud” occurred closer to the point of sale–brokers who encouraged lying on credit apps and what not. A few levels above those folks, the mortgage bankers who sold “HIGH RISK ZERO EQUITY HOME LOANS” to the sophisticated investors were simply rolling the dice which is called “high finance” these days.
So–the low life should go to jail, the dumb shits should lose their homes, and the greedy should not be bailed out.
Thats my take, letting the punishment fit the crime.
I serviced high risk loans for a few years. We gave loans to people who did not meet the normal criteria on a case by case basis, and had a lower than industry standard default rate, so there’s people around who are good bets being short changed on bank loans. It was a state program, since gutted by politicians at the behest of the bankers. The people who need the loans cannot get them any more.
That said, the sub-prime mess was started by political scam artists who lied about minorities getting shabby treatment from banks. Politicians changed the rules to “encourage” loans to such “deserving” minorities. I don’t know if the banks got a promise from the fedgov that any defaults would be covered, I doubt the banks would have gone along with the program if they were going to be the ones stuck with the bad loan.
Anyhow, if you want to know where to look for the guilty, check your ballot next election and see who your incumbents are and check out how they suck up to people like Jesse Jackson.
#9–Phillep==you’re saying a law was passed REQUIRING banks to loan to unqualified people and for oversea’s investors to buy their paper?
The politicians may have done away with the laws preventing bad loans, but I doubt the banks did not have a choice.
AS BAD as our politics are, those self serving bastards are not responsible for every bad thing that happens–at least not directly.
>>Now lets see==you want to put greedy ,
>>stupid bankers in jail for making bad
>>business decisions?
Clean off your glasses, Bobski. The “bad decisions” were nothing more than crack dealers peddling their wares in the ghetto, just dressed up in a $3000 suit and peddling them on Wall Street. These weren’t “bad decisions”, they were criminal acts. And premeditated, to boot.
If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.
MM–please re-read post #8. I very much doubt ((but can’t disprove and certainly don’t “believe”, nor have I made it my religion)) that WALL STREET BANKERS were trolling the ghetto and issuing out fraudulent home mortgage applications.
You’ve got to differentiate the crimes here, and more to the point, differentiate crimes from bad business.
Stupid not to.
Bobster: No, they weren’t trolling. They let “their people” do the trolling, then they rolled the results up and packaged them into CDOs and mortgage-backed securities and all the other Hi Finance mumbo jumbo that nobody can understand.
The trolls made a few bucks; the Wall Street bankers made billions. Now that they’re swirling the drain, Ben Bernanke and the Treasury are shitting their pants trying to bail them out.
Chain gang. Breaking rocks in the hot sun. Anything else would be a miscarriage of justice.
I wish the gov would butt out let the chips fall where they may. They are propping up home prices now instead of letting the market decide what the homes are worth. Until we find out what these properties are really worth this “crisis” will continue. You would have to be a fool to buy a home right now. We have six homes on my block that have set empty for two years owned by banks. All were heavily over appraised. This is the big problem no one will know what these homes are worth until sell. That does not look like that will happen soon.
#9, Philleep,
Well, once again you missed the mark,
… the sub-prime mess was started by political scam artists who lied about minorities getting shabby treatment from banks. Politicians changed the rules to “encourage” loans to such “deserving” minorities. I don’t know if the banks got a promise from the fedgov that any defaults would be covered,
The banks and lending institutions were called on the carpet by Congress for not giving loans to minorities or offering loans at higher rates of interest. No scam bullshit except from the mouth pieces like you that like discrimination.
The only payback to the financial institutions was the increased difficulty in filing for bankruptcy. Now everyone is offered several 0% credit cards a weeks. Only the terms change when least expected and there is NO protection.
The two largest reasons for bankruptcy in this country are medical bills (most people were insured but the deductibles and user fees hit) and loss of a good paying job. Claiming that everyone is stupid that defaults is typical Republican bullshit as they try to explain why they help out the lenders but piss on voters.
*
These vultures all need a little persuasion upside the head. Delivered by someone who lost their home. Then after they take care of the Republican apologists, they can deal with the smucks that took advantage of the victims.