false information and mis presentation If you know about foreclosure fraud, the mass fabrication of mortgage documents in state courts by banks attempting to foreclose on homeowners, you may have one nagging question : Why did banks have to resort to this illegal scheme? Was it just cheaper to mock up the documents than to provide the real ones? Did banks figure they simply had enough power over regulators, politicians and the courts to get away with it? ( They were probably right about that one. ) A newly unsealed lawsuit, which banks settled in XXXX for {$95.00} XXXX, actually offers a different reason, providing a key answer to one of the persistent riddles of the financial crisis and its aftermath. The lawsuit states that banks resorted to fake documents because they could not legally establish true ownership of the loans when trying to foreclose. 
This reality, which banks did not contest but instead settled out of court, means that tens of millions of mortgages in America still lack a legitimate chain of ownership, with implications far into the future. And if Congress, supported by the Obama administration, goes back to the same housing finance system, with the same corrupt private entities who broke the nation 's private property system back in business packaging mortgages, then shame on all of us.The XXXX lawsuit was filed in XXXX XXXX XXXX in both North and South Carolina, by a white-collar fraud specialist named XXXX XXXX, on behalf of the federal government, XXXX states and XXXX cities. XXXX banks, mortgage servicers and document processing companies are named in the lawsuit, including mega-banks like XXXX XXXX, XXXX XXXX, XXXX and XXXX XXXX XXXX. 
XXXX, who fell into foreclosure herself in XXXX, researched her own mortgage documents and found massive fraud ( for example, one document claimed that XXXX, listed as the owner of her mortgage, acquired ownership in XXXX XXXX, four months after they first filed for foreclosure ). She eventually examined tens of thousands of documents, enough to piece together the entire scheme. 
A mortgage has two parts : the promissory note ( the IOU from the borrower to the lender ) and the mortgage, which creates the lien on the home in case of default. During the housing bubble, banks bought loans from originators, and then ( in a process known as securitization ) enacted a series of transactions that would eventually pool thousands of mortgages into bonds, sold all over the world to public pension funds, state and municipal governments and other investors. A trustee would pool the loans and sell the securities to investors, and the investors would get an annual percentage yield on their money. 
In order for the securitization to work, banks purchasing the mortgages had to physically convey the promissory note and the mortgage into the trust. The note had to be endorsed ( the way an individual would endorse a check ), and handed over to a document custodian for the trust, with a " mortgage assignment '' confirming the transfer of ownership. And this had to be done before a 90-day cutoff date, with no grace period beyond that. 
XXXX Law professor XXXX XXXX spelled this out in testimony before Congress in XXXX : " If mortgages were not properly transferred in the securitization process, then mortgage-backed securities would in fact not be backed by any mortgages whatsoever. '' The lawsuit alleges that these notes, as well as the mortgage assignments, were " never delivered to the mortgage-backed securities trusts, '' and that the trustees lied to the SEC and investors about this. As a result, the trusts could not establish ownership of the loan when hey went to foreclose, forcing the production of a stream of false documents, signed by " robo-signers, '' employees using a bevy of corporate titles for companies that never employed them, ... ..