Danny Schechter - ColdType

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sion in which he examined one homeowner’s mortgage document.
He’s pointing at one page of the mortgage: “You have this
signature, her actual signature. And this was from 1993, showing
a completely different signature. It doesn’t take a rocket
scientist to see there’s something terribly wrong here.
“There’s an entry here of a consultant fee. That should set
off red flags. There are not really any consultants on a mortgage
sale. It should have been one fee to Rise Mortgage. (Not
to someone else.) This Mark Murphy (the consultant) is someone
we need to investigate to find out why he got $7800 dollars
on this loan.
“These people fraudulently took this woman’s home that
she’s been living in for 15 years, thinking it was hers, when it
hasn’t been hers since 1993.”
A line-by-line review of the application revealed deliberate
misinformation, a pattern later confirmed in many investigations.
What is new is Dan Osso’s testimony that this was done
deliberately and by design.
He told me, “The fraud and deception that was built into
these transactions was a necessary part of the transaction in
order to generate the profits. I think what happened is that the
gravy train got so fat no one cared. They figured that this thing
would never end. This was a train that had taken off. There is
too much money being made by too many people, especially
big people in the business – so why kill the golden goose? Let’s
just let it ride. They thought there would be no end to this
whole thing.”
Economists Tito Boeri and Luigi Guiso, argue on the European
site Vox that mortage hustlers took advantage of the low
level of financial literacy among American home buyers. They
knew what consumers didn’t know and knew how to confuse
them. The U.S. educational system and media bear the
responsibility for this situation.