Danny Schechter - ColdType

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Later, the FBI would cite massive fraud in many of the
transactions that got people into homes – abusive practices of
many kinds. They first warned of a “fraud epidemic” in 2004 –
also revealing that their capacity to investigate this epidemic
was limited because many corporate fraud investigators had
been transferred to fight terrorism.
When the problem got too big to ignore, they launched
“Operation Malicious Mortgage.” Director Robert Mueller
spoke at the first press conference: “Through this operation,
more than 400 defendants have been charged. We have
attained 173 convictions in crimes that have accounted for
more than $1 billion in estimated losses.”
At the same time, Congress was told that the FBI had fewer
than 250 special agents assigned to financial fraud cases,
despite caseloads having more than doubled in the past three
years. The FBI admitted it could not investigate the more than
5,000 fraud allegations received by the Treasury Department
each month.
In a speech to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the head
of the agency charged with investigating mortgage fraud,
revealed the numbers were escalating way beyond the extant
5,000 allegations.
For our first detailed study focusing exclusively on mortgage
fraud, published in November 2006, we proceeded to go back
to take a closer look at all of the mortgage fraud filings since
the inception of the suspicious activity report (SAR) reporting
requirements, analyzing ten years of mortgage fraud reporting
data nationwide. Depository institutions filed more than
82,000 (82,851) SARs describing suspected mortgage fraud
between April 1, 1996 and March 31, 2006. SARs, pertaining
to mortgage fraud, increased by 1,411 percent
in nearly a decade between 1997 and 2005, compared to a
543 percent increase for SARs overall.