So You Proved The Bank Lied About Your Loan. Now What?
Posted on April 4, 2014 bySay you are fighting a foreclosure on a securitized loan that you took out during the housing boom. Using a fraud investigator you were able to prove that the foreclosing entity forged your signature on the note. You rest your case and wait for the judge to come back with a ruling in your favor. Ten minutes later the judge rules that the foreclosure can continue as scheduled. This is surely a miscarriage of justice, right?
Not so fast. The judge made the right call, and you need a better attorney.
Here’s an example. Let’s say a friend lends you $1,000 and you agree to pay him back in installments. After a few months of making payments on time, you default on the loan and your friend sues you. In court your friend produces a promissory note that lays out the terms of the loan with your signature. You acknowledge that you were lent the money by your friend and then defaulted on the loan, but you have never seen this promissory note before. Furthermore, you have evidence that your signature on the note was a forgery. Under the rules of evidence, your proof of forgery should be tossed out. The reason is simple. You have already admitted to owing your friend the $1,000 and that you defaulted on the debt.
A note is merely documentation of the debt. If you have already acknowledged that you owed the money and then defaulted on the terms, the note itself, whether forged or legitimate, is irrelevant.
Without the note, all the court is left with is your acknowledgement of the debt and your default. The path to victory against the banks lies not in merely proving they forged a few documents here and there, but in proving that the bank has never had any claim to the debt in the first place.
The court is going to assume that the bank wouldn’t be there without a reason, so you must attack the debt itself. In our earlier example, what would happen if your friend sued you for defaulting on the loan and produces a promissory note with your forged signature, but you deny the debt or default ever existed? The burden of proof would fall onto your friend to prove that he actually gave you $1,000.
But how can you legitimately claim to not know who funded your loan when you signed the note yourself? Simple. Over 95% of all loans originated during the housing boom were what are known as “table funded” loans. This means the loan was closed in the originators name regardless of whether or not they actually funded the loan. This means that in 95% of these mortgages, the borrower has no idea who actually lent them the money. Now it is up to the foreclosing entity to prove that they have the power to collect on the debt.
Once you’ve established a broken or tainted chain of title, THEN you can nail the bank with the forgery as an example of their malfeasance.
If you know of anyone with a defaulted note, you need to get in contact with my office immediately at (706)-485-0162. I have spent the last two years building up a team of experienced attorneys and fraud examiners/forensic auditors who specialize in exposing exactly this sort of fraud and negotiating the sale of notes.
We have a huge opportunity to help homeowners and do some great deals with multiple exit strategies by exposing this unbelievable and blatant fraud. We finally have the leverage we need to get the banks negotiating on our terms. It doesn’t matter if the homeowner has already been foreclosed on, we might be able to help.