Matt Weidner – Fighting For The American People

Posts Tagged ‘jeffrey stephan’

I cannot say such things, such comments are heresy and unbecoming. But I honor the courage of a fine and deeply committed lawyer who shows his honor by speaking out. I encourage everyone to please read carefully the important words of this attorney and consider the impact of his statement on the rights and the future for all of us:

If the courts can’t address clear instances of fraud and injustice, how can they protect our citizens?

It has been exactly 18 months since I deposed GMAC Mortgage’s prolific document signer, Jeffrey Stephan, in a case where I was defending a Maine homeowner in foreclosure. Stephan admitted to signing 8,000 to 10,000 foreclosure documents a month (that is about one a minute, if you do the arithmetic), including summary judgment affidavits used by courts as the basis for entering foreclosure judgments. Stephan’s affidavits were sent by GMAC to courts all over the country. Obviously, and as Stephan admitted, he did not bother to read those affidavits. He also admitted that he had no idea as to whether the foreclosure affidavits that he signed were true. He didn’t even trouble himself to appear before a notary to be sworn, even though his affidavits said that he had done so. While Stephan admitted that he understood that judges were relying upon his affidavits to take away the homes of homeowners all over the country, he seemed serene and untroubled by his dishonesty in signing these false affidavits. (Conduct like this has since been awarded the slang term “robo-signing,” but I never use it because it fails to adequately describe the dishonesty and deception involved.)

TOM COX

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The court finds wrongdoing, but denies real sanctions or penalty…..

StephenSanctions196 Rule 56(g) Sanctions order.D.Ct. Maine.20110131[1]

An article published in Wednesday’s St. Petersburg Times, written by Kris Hundley, discusses Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court Judges’ statements that “… they’ve never seen anything like the letters they’ve been receiving over the past few weeks from the South Florida foreclosure law firm of David J. Stern.”

Read the full article here on Tampabay.com

The press is starting to pick up on what will be an unavoidable and unresolvable conflict in foreclosure cases….fraud in service of process.

Forget about Jeffrey Stephan and the other “technical” problems with foreclosure files, because when you don’t have good service of process, you don’t have jurisdiction and if you don’t have jurisdiction any judgment is VOID.

This is a massive issue and we’re going to start picking apart the process servers just like we’ve been taking down all the other conning/fraudulent elements that have infected the entire foreclosure process.

Examine all your summonses carefully and let’s all start comparing the alleged “signatures” on summonses…oh and the affidavits of diligent search and inquiries….wonder just how diligent they really were?  Were the summons actually served by the licensed process server or were others doing service? (That’s void service.)

How many attempts were actually made by process servers?  Who exactly are the “neighbors” that the process servers always seem to talk with but never identify?  Exactly how many mobile homes do they try and serve at?  How much is over billed for service of process charges (but no one is looking right, and I mean it’s only foreclosure right)?

Are the summons actually real, authentic and issued by the court?

Read the first in what will be many more stories here.

This is an issue that will not go away and cannot just be swept under the rug.  There is no statute of limitations on fraud in service of process. (Hello title insurers, just how confident are you in the process servers and your law firms?)

At some point in time, I’m going to sit down and write the full story on the tragedy that is the Foreclosure Wars.  The press is doing an excellent job of pulling the pieces together, but there are so many details and important facts that are being missed.  When I write the book, it’s going to start like this:

The collapse of the American economy didn’t begin in the First Great Financial Collapse in 2008, or in the Second Great Collapse that’s coming in 2011, it began in 2004 when New Century Mortgage extended a loan on a home in a rough section of town in St. Petersburg, Florida to a couple who had no chance of ever repaying it…and no real incentive to repay it.

I had a front row seat to this collapse when I was hired to foreclose on the second mortgage my client had placed on the home.  My client was the typical American entrepreneur.  He worked eight hours a day at his full time job, then he’d spend another 8 hours building by hand, often by himself, a series of homes in this troubled part of town.  As he neared completion of his one off, solidly built American dreams, he would stick a sign in the yard and in a few days the home would be under contract to a family ready to claim their piece of the American dream with no money down, no real ability to pay for the home and no chance of ever climbing out from under the massive mortgage debt they would sign up for.

In this particular case, New Century Mortgage gave the borrowers a $150,000 mortgage and my client gave a $25,000 second mortgage, a figure that represented the entire profit my builder client hoped to make after breaking his back for six months. This was just a few years before the subprimes would loan any amount of money to anyone.  At this point in time, no lender was willing to pony up the full $175,000 that would have allowed my client to immediately take his profit off the top.  My client’s only hope to take his profit was the hope was some other lender would come along in a few months to offer the hopeless homeowners a bigger loan and pay him off in full.  The new homeowners moved in to their brand new, shining example of The American Dream and all was well….for a few short months.  It didn’t take long before payments were late and the homeowners were in default. (Remember they had no hope of ever making the income they would need to support this home in even the short run.)  First came the foreclosure lawsuit filed by something that claimed it actually owned the $150,000 first mortgage, Deutshe Bank Trust, filed by one of Florida’s now infamous Foreclosure Mills.  Next came the foreclosure lawsuit I filed on behalf of my client, seeking to recover the $25,000 he claimed he was due on the second mortgage.

A most interesting thing happened when the foreclosure mill called into the judge’s chambers to try and foreclose the First Mortgage.  I was at the hearing on behalf of my client the second mortgage holder and I raised some objection to the Affidavit that was submitted by the foreclosure mill. The judge agreed that my objection was valid and then a most curious exchange occurred.  The Foreclosure Mill replied over the speaker phone, “that’s no problem judge, I can just correct the Affidavit and have it faxed right over to you.”  The judge and I both questioned how this were possible when the lender was a corporation based in California. “Well”, the Foreclosure Mill Replied, “That’s because we actually produce and sign the affidavits right here in the law office”

BOMBSHELL–The hearing and exchange described above occurred in 2006, long before Jeffrey Stephan and the robo signer controversy of 2010.  So here we were in a hearing and the attorneys on one side of the case admitted that they were producing and entering the evidence they needed to win their case.  This would seem to be a clear cut and blatant violation of all rule of evidence and ethics, but it was apparently a widespread practice….when the judge raised objections to the fact that attorneys were entering evidence, the Foreclosure Mill helpfully replied, “It’s not a problem for us to file these affidavits, we do it all over the state.”  Hmmmmm…. “We do it all over the state.”

If we looked back at all the foreclosure cases that have been “won” by the banks since 2006, my mind struggles to comprehend how many of these cases should not have been “won” by the banks at all if a) we all realized the long tern consequences of allowing such flawed and faulty procedures to occur and; b) we had all been paying closer attention to the manipulations of the foreclosure mills, the subprime lenders and the Wall Street Fat Cats that caused all this mess.

Subprime Loans Were Never Intended To Be Repaid

A key fact, and one that people (understandably) have a hard time wrapping their heads around, is the fact that this family never had any hope of repaying this loan.  The vast majority of subprime loans were never going to be repaid, even if the US economy kept chugging right along.  So what company in their right mind would ever write a $150.000 check when they knew there was no hope of repaying that loan and what other incentives were at play in the orgy to write billions in dollars in loans that were not going to be repaid….that’s where the real (phantom) money comes in.

An excellent article on the development of foreclosure defense and how it has developed nationwide.  My only comment is that it misses the most important piece of the puzzle….April Charney.  We all know that April has done more to help homeowners and advance this area of the law than any other lawyer or advocate in this country!

Wall Street Journal Here