Evicted Family Breaks Lock, Reclaims Foreclosed House While New Owners Wait (Bizarre Video)

Foreclosure fraud could be the culprit.  Unclear at this point.  Interesting that the police chose to let them stay.

• Get more detail

The new owners were expected to take possession of the home in a few days, but the Earls and their attorney hired a locksmith to open the doors so they could reclaim the house.

"This is a really exciting day, a day we've been waiting for," said Danielle Earl. "My kids have been begging to go home and we're finally home.

This comes at a time when some banks are halting foreclosures across the country due to flawed paperwork. The family and their attorney said the bank used fraudulent paperwork to force them out.

The Earls said they had been working with the bank to catch up on payments, but discovered a $25,000 difference between the amount they thought they owed and what the bank claimed they owed so they stopped making payments.

"This is only the beginning of this," said the Earl's attorney, Michael Pines. "I chose this family because we needed to get back in before the investor and the real estate broker defrauded a new family by having them move in, which would have created a bigger mess. (The Earls) have done absolutely nothing wrong."

Police arrived at the home Saturday but did not take action to make the family leave.

Comments

[DailyBail]

How Democracy Dies: Lessons From a Master

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_democracy_dies_lessons_from_a_master_20101011

[DailyBail]

4. The entire industry stopped keeping track of who bought and sold. This brings us back to the aforementioned MERS. Headquartered in Reston, MERS was founded by this guy Paul Mullings who is now an executive at Freddie Mac and it is currently helmed by a fellow named R.K. Arnold who according to one account spends his leisure time collecting military toys. MERS was created to sidestep the process by which buyers and sellers of homes used to record transactions with local authorities by just entering deed and lien information electronically into a database. MERS did not even have to lobby anyone to change any laws do this, apparently: “The mortgage industry just changed how the land title system worked without getting anyone’s okay,” a law professor explained to the Washington Post. Various libertards are now arguing that since mortgages change hands a lot more often than actual houses do, MERS is the only “efficient” way of doing things, which might be true were there any evidence they were actual “doing” anything; two lawyers I spoke with and everyone quoted by anyone else who has actually done any reporting into the matter say that MERS has a pretty sloppy record of recording this stuff, since it has almost no employees of its own. That has not stopped MERS from volunteering its name to be used on the “plaintiff” side of millions of foreclosure actions, despite having no claim to anything at all except a poorly-kept database no one uses, but they have stopped doing that so much in recent months because a lot of judges have decided it might be against the law. But really, should someone have to have a claim on your house to file a foreclosure notice on it?

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/daskrapital/2010/10/11/5-things-david-axelrod-must-have-missed-about-the-foreclosure-thing/

[DailyBail]

Study highlights CDS shortcomings

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8c845ae4-d567-11df-8e86-00144feabdc0.html

[DailyBail]

Regulators are struggling to create a global mechanism that could wind down a big financial institution without the disruption caused by Lehman Brothers’ collapse in 2008.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fd62a344-d56f-11df-8e86-00144feabdc0.html

[Dr. Pitchfork]

Wow. I don't know the story on this, but these people bought their house 9 years ago. Did they refi? Did they have a home equity loan on top of the mortgage? Whatever the right or wrong, I'm just glad to see people -- besides the bankers -- taking the law into their own hands. If this gets a lot of airplay, expect to see this happen more and more across the country. DB, I know you're not a Gerald Celente fan, but one of the things he likes to say is that when people lose everything and they've got nothing left to lose, they LOSE IT. I'm honestly surprised more husbands and fathers haven't gone apeshit already.

[Fred Smith]

Nobody has brought up the distinct possibility that the loan servicers may well have bundled and sold each of these loans MORE THAN ONCE to differernt investors via the securitization process. THIS COULD BE THE REAL REASON THAT THERE IS NO DOCUMENTATION / PAPER TRAIL. The non-existent documentation and accounting is entirely consistent with this scenario. This means that the entire plan was a true Ponzi scheme in the worst sense. In other words, rather than selling the loan once to investors, as we have all naively been assuming, there is no reason to believe that they did not double-dip or quintuple-dip and sell the exact same loan to completely new buyers. THIS IS A LEVEL OF FRAUD THAT THE AMERICAN PUBLIC HAS NOT YET CONTEMPLATED.

[DailyBail]

Fred./..i've read and heard this scenario before..if it's true it's armageddon...

[Dr. Pitchfork]

Fred/ DB,

Any idea how that would even work? There would only be one set of mortgage payments coming in, no matter how many times you sold the mortgage. If you did that on a scale large enough to be worth the effort and risk, it seems that you would also have to do it on a scale large enough to be readily noticeable. I can imagine this happening accidentally -- which would lead to invalid foreclosures, but to do it on purpose would expose your plan almost immediately -- I would think.

Still, even a few accidents here and there is enough to cause major havoc.

[Dr. Pitchfork]

More on the family (From the WSJ via Zero Hedge):

The Earls paid $500,000 for the house in 2001 and then refinanced to pull out cash. They fell behind on their mortgage and at the time of their eviction they owed about $880,000 on a no-interest mortgage.

Investors at Conejo Capital bought the house for $697,000 at a lender’s trustee sale and put $40,000 of work into a remodel, replacing carpeting and appliances, as well as upgrading the kitchen. They flipped it to new buyers for $800,000. Those buyers were supposed to move in this week; those plans are on hold.
---
OK, so they're not the poster children for foreclosure "victims," but it is nice to see the banks on the receiving in of this kind of crap.

I wonder what they did with the hundreds of thousands in refi cash.

[DailyBail]

good detail pitch...as you know i covered the story not out of sympathy for the couple but rather to demonstrate the chaos that is coming with foreclosures...all the headlines make this type of thing more likely to happen in the future...

[Dr. Pitchfork]

i'm second guessing some of this, now. if you watched the ratigan interview, the couple paid over 100K over a short period of time, and the balance on the mortgage just went up and up! sounds like the servicer has no idea what they're doing and wouldn't talk about it. i don't blame them for stopping payments. then again, someone would be shot before i'd have left in the first place. people really need to start shooting more. i highly recommend it. FOR SELF DEFENSE ONLY, of course.

[DailyBail]

yes...their lawyer sounded as though he knew what he was talking about...so he likely has verified the details....i lleft a comment on another thread earlier about my conversation with a foreclosure fraud lawyer today..said there are NO clean chains of title...something is lost in essentially every case...

[Dr. Pitchfork]

lol. i thought you were quoting dean baker. yeah, something along those lines would have been my guess. who knew the greed of trial lawyers would threaten to sink the TBTF banks. black swan is finger lickin' good.

[DailyBail]

who knew the greed of trial lawyers would threaten to sink the TBTF banks.

---

i've had the same thought...first time i've been excited about something like this in a awhile...man i hate these banks...i hope the sharks tear them to bits...i think the mortgage bond liability that faber and salmon talked about could be huge...