Are you in foreclosure in Tampa/St. Petersburg? Read this from Naked Capitalism:
Over the last two and a half years, Wells Fargo, like most of the major mortgage servicers, claimed that it had a ” rigorous system“ to insure that mortgage documents were accurate and complete. The reason this mattered was that there was significant evidence to the contrary. Foreclosure defense attorneys found repeatedly that, for securitized mortgages, the servicer or foreclosure mill attorney would present documents to the court that failed to show the borrower’s note (a promissory note) had been transferred properly to the trust. This mattered not only on a borrower level, but indicated that originators of the mortgage securitizations hadn’t bothered transferring the notes properly to the trusts that were to hold them. This raised the ugly specter of what was called ” securitization fail,” that investors had been sold securities that they had been told were mortgage backed when they might in practice not be.
The robosiging scandal was merely the tip of the iceberg of mortgage and foreclosure problems that resulted from the failure to adhere to the requirements of well-settled state real estate law. The banks maintained that there was nothing wrong with mortgage ownership or with the records. All they had were occasional errors and some unfortunate corners-cutting with affidavits. If they merely re-executed all those robosigned documents, all would be well.
Wells Fargo’s own actions say the reverse. It has been doctoring documents in house for over fifteen months for borrowers who are targeted for foreclosure. It was having this sort of work done outside the bank for an unknown period of time prior to that.
A contractor who worked at a Wells Fargo facility in Minnesota reports that the bank engaged in systematic, large scale alteration of mortgage notes and fabrication of related documents in preparation for foreclosure. The procedures the bank used are questionable for a large portion of the mortgages.
The bigger issue is that Plaintiff attorneys argue, and judges as well as DCA judges continue to hold that homeowners lack standing to challenge this depositor-trust transaction. The reasoning is that the homeowner is a 3rd party, not an intended beneficiary of the agreement/contract, and thus under contract law has no standing to challenge whether the note made it into the trust or not.
The judges firmly believe that the bank has the note now, normally endorsed in blank, and thus has standing to foreclose now. What happened with the trust matters to the investors etc. but not the homeowner.
The issue is how does a homeowner even attempt to challenge this trust relationship and depositing of the note without legal standing? Until the law changes at the DCA of S Ct I dont see a way that this is a viable defense to foreclosure unfortunately.