For a couple of Orange County (CA) residents Thanksgiving weekend just wasn’t what they were accustomed to. A Nevada grand jury indicted the couple in what appears to be the first criminal case filed connected to the nationwide ‘robo signing’ scandal. According to Jeff Collins, reporter with the OC Register, ‘both are title officers who worked for the Jacksonville, FL mortgage servicing firm Lender Processing Service.”
The time is ripe for the Lenders ‘C-Level’ Suite to step up, put a stake in the ground that these issues should never be tolerated – and move forward with an all-electronic and digital transaction – eliminating the associated fraud associated with human error, back-dating, white-out, cut and paste signatures, substitution of false documents, etc. Secure ‘tamper-resistant’ document processing technology has been available for years – tested, live and certified (by all Industry participants/leadership-sans Lenders) - gurading against such ‘all-so-common’ instances of fraud and outrageous manipulation. The article further mentioned a Huffington Post quote from University of Minnesota law Professor Prentice Cox, a former Assistant State Attorney General, adding: ” When criminal prosecutions are done for robo-signing, I would hope the target of those prosecutions would be the people who designed the system and profited from it, not just the low level people doing what they were told.” Read More…
Published on FierceFinance (http://www.fiercefinance.com)
By Jim Kim
Created Sep 29 2010 – 8:33pm
For mortgage servicers, the recent moves by GMAC Mortgage and JPMorgan Chase to suspend foreclosures is nothing short of a nightmare. Lawyers for aggrieved mortgage holders have thrown a huge wrench into the market with revelations of so-called robo-signers who sign documents en masse, without personally reviewing the documents they are supposedly attesting to.
A deposed Chase employee said she and her team signed off on about 18,000 foreclosure documents a month without reviewing the loan files, reports MarketWatch. Up to 56,000 cases are affected.
At GMAC, a professional signer said he signed up to 500 foreclosure affidavits a day without reviewing files or having his signatures notarized, MarketWatch notes.
This has exploded into a huge control and compliance issue that may expand to other mortgage servicers, while presenting something of a gift to affected homeowners. Lawyers would like to pain this as an issue of servicers not knowing who holds the note. But in the case of JPMorgan, signers say they relied on the work of others in the firm. That may not prove to be enough, however.
The servicers have seen enough to know that suspending foreclosures is the safest move right now. State AGs are taking a close look at the situation. It’s all complicated by the fact that the U.S. is a big owner of GMAC.
For more:
- here’s a MarketWatch article [1]
SUPREME COURT AFFIRMS BUSINESS METHOD PATENTS
Orange County, CA, July 5, 2010 Settleware® Secure Services, Inc. a leading provider of patented and innovative e-Signature solutions, today announced that it welcomed last week’s ruling by the Supreme Court in the Bilski v. Kappos case. After much anticipation, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the need for patent laws that ensure technological progress, rejecting a federal circuit court’s opinion
“We were pleasantly surprised and applaud the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Bilski case,” stated C. Richard Triola, President & CEO of Settleware Secure Services, Inc. With this ruling, the court has opined that applying the lower court’s very narrow view of business method patents would stifle innovation of technologies such as those utilized by Settleware in the Internet and computer software industry. Triola continued, “We have developed and patented our industry leading solutions, and our IP portfolio provides protection for our innovations. With the higher courts ruling patent law has been enriched and provides critically important incentives to all of our stakeholders and strengthens the value proposition and ownership of our technologies in our business sector. This important Supreme Court ruling will enable Settleware, innovators and the entire software industry to continue making important contributions in the future.
About Settleware®
With offices in Orange County, Calif. and Raleigh, NC, Settleware Secure Services, Inc. has been working to facilitate electronic and paperless real estate/mortgage transactions since 1999 and is the leading provider of e-Signatures, e-Notarization and e-Recording workflow to the Mortgage/Real Estate/Mortgage Industry. Settleware offers the first and only e-signing solution for the fully-electronic real estate and mortgage transaction, from the offer contract to the County Recorder and to the Secondary Investor. The company’s innovative workflow meets guidelines set by the E-Sign Act and UETA and supports both MISMO SMART Doc® and e-Signed PDF standards. The company offers a secure signing solution that provides document tamper sealing, roles and permissions access and secure digital encryption algorithms that can authenticate the source of a digital signature as “valid” while providing one of the Industry’s first certified e-Vaults. The company’s low-cost and patented Web-based solution seamlessly connects all participants in the real estate/mortgage transaction, is vendor neutral and is offered as an affordable Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription basis. For more information about Settleware contact us 949.313.7703, info@settleware.com or visit the company’s website at www.settleware.com.
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