Originaly by Jeff Manning:  A federal grand jury charged three former Portland-area mortgage brokers with fraud on Wednesday. Joel D. Surprenant, Michael Duc Han and Benjamin Lucian Lucescu all were charged with one count of obtaining mortgage loans through materially false and fraudulent pretenses. The...

Originaly by Luke Mullins: In a report released Monday, the Mortgage Asset Research Institute outlined the top ten states for mortgage fraud in 2008. From the press release: Reported incidents of mortgage fraud in the U.S. are at an all-time high and increased by 26 percent from 2007 to 2008 according...

Originaly by Abby Simons: Embattled homeowner needs to post a $49,940 bond by Monday. Her supporters may try to block the eviction A Minneapolis woman who has battled eviction could be forced out of her house as early as next week unless she can post a $50,000 bond. Although negotiations between Rosemary...

Originaly by wftv: OSCEOLA COUNTY, Fla. — Eyewitness News found an Osceola County homeowner won her battle in court to save her home from foreclosure, but the bank wouldn’t listen.   Ana Chavez used to live on Kilimanjaro Drive until the Bank of America changed her door locks in violation...

Originaly by Laura Brown: GRASS VALLEY, Calif. — Investors and borrowers who lost millions of dollars in real estate transactions with Thomas Hastert’s company, Loan Sense, say they had one thing in common: Trust. At 1:30 p.m. today the former lawyer and real estate loan broker is slated appear...

Originaly By Curtis Lum: Kauai resident charged with bilking investors out of $16M through Ponzi scheme A federal grand jury yesterday indicted a 58-year-old Kaua’i man on charges that he operated a Ponzi scheme that allegedly defrauded 140 investors out of $16 million over a four-year period. David...

Wells Fargo gave high-cost, subprime loans more often to its highest-earning African-American borrowers in Baltimore and Chicago than to its lowest-earning white borrowers in 2007, according to an analysis of mortgage lending data by The Chicago Reporter.    In 2007, nearly 25 percent of Wells Fargo’s...

Originialy By Mary Kane: Brokers Pushed Borrowers to Lie, Lenders Misled and Ratings Agencies Looked the Other Way The debate over what caused the mortgage mess and how best to fix it is now taking a sharp turn, as new problems surrounding liar’s loans and payment-option mortgages reveal the pervasive...

Originaly by Mark Gimein: How the mortgage industry nurtured deceit. Here’s the narrative we’ve heard about the mortgage meltdown: miscalculation and unfounded optimism, clueless investors, cash-strapped home buyers clobbered by rate resets. But there’s one piece of the mortgage-meltdown...