About We are all well aware of the foreclosure crisis that has been raging on for a long time now. We have discussed earlier the robo-signing scandal and that courts have repeatedly ruled against the banks. Jeffrey Stephan, one of the robo-signers admitted in a deposition that he may have signed as many as 10,000 documents a month and that he rarely read the documents he signed and had not verified their validity. Allegations of foreclosure misconduct spread like wildfire along with investigations and promises of reform. Every state’s Attorney General office in the country is pursuing a joint inquiry into foreclosure practices.
The banks apparently thought they could just slow down for a while and then when the dust had settled, resume their foreclosure pace without actually fixing the problem.
Massachusetts Supreme Court recently threw out foreclosures in the Ibanez case Where Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp “failed to make the required showing that they were holders of the mortgages at the time of the foreclosure.”
The next story to appear was the decision in Maryland where GMAC said that it will be dropping approximately 250 foreclosure cases where documents had been filed by Stephan. Maryland has recently instituted new procedures to protect homeowners. GMAC plans to re-file these cases following Maryland’s new rules. This action came about following a challenge by Civil Justice, a Maryland nonprofit group, against any GMAC foreclosure where the document filings may have been tainted. The group thinks that as many as 1,000 cases may be involved. GMAC disputes this number.
GMAC plans to refile each of these cases, think that it will be a lot cleaner to start from scratch.
A GMAC spokesman says the problem is unique to Maryland. That’s nice except that each time a bank gets slapped by a judge the bank claims that the case is unique to that state. Remember, Massachusetts, like Nevada is a non-judicial foreclosure state.