Foreclosure Climate was Ideal for breeding Scammers like Tony Symmes
The foreclosure climate was ideal for breeding scammer like Tony Symmes. National attention was focused today against Tony Symmes, the builder of residential units in Chico. Eric Holder, the Attorney General in a Washington news conference sketched a picture of 500 arrests conducted since last March by the department of justice in a significant crackdown on fraud related to mortgages.
The pan American move has been dubbed Operation Stolen Dreams. It is the biggest joint effort by the enforcement branch set to face up to the snowballing problems of mortgage scams. Holder detailed that the operation has involved 1,215 defendants in the cases that exposed the loss of over $2.3 million.
The civil enforcement has also been engaged by the department of judgment to recover over $147 million through these operations.
Two companies under Countrywide will compensate $108 million to settle the charges brought against them that they had willfully taken exorbitant fees from the homeowners.
Innumerable agents of FBI are operating with the task forces and other enforcing agencies to battle a kind of criminal activity that is posing a risk to the economic stability of USA. As a nation American is threatened, said Robert Mueller the Director of FBI.
The Department of Justice noted that as a result of the probe, important criminal cases have been initiated in Atlanta, New Jersey, Minnesota, Duluth, Miami and Detroit.
The Department of Justice recounted how in Chico Symmes had in his portfolio new houses that had not been sold when the real estate market began to simmer down in 2006. He then sold the units to straw buyers at inflated rates and then discounted huge amounts to firms controlled by the agents of these straw buyers. The lenders knew about these rebates. It was also informed that till now, of these houses 38 have been foreclosed upon.
A “ghost loan” mortgage scheme was busted in Detroit by the investigators. The scammers pretended to be mortgage brokers, evaluators, real estate agents etc. They collected over 108 of these straw buyers and got approximately 500 mortgages that totaled to over $100 million.
In Miami the scams focused Haitian-Americans. This helped the increase of foreclosure listings in Florida. One of those docked was a woman who claimed to be of help in immigration problems. She also offered assistance for availing of housing programmes of the government as she had links with the manager. The accused in this case made use of personal information collected in an underhand manner about various properties without the knowledge of the residents of Haiti.
