[Vision2020] Hang Them High

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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February 6, 2012
Company Faces Forgery Charges in Mo. Foreclosures By GRETCHEN
MORGENSON<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/gretchen_morgenson/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

One of the largest companies that provided home
foreclosure<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/foreclosures/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>services
to lenders across the nation, DocX, has been indicted on forgery
charges by a Missouri grand jury — one of the few criminal actions to
follow reports of widespread improprieties against homeowners.

A grand jury in Boone County, Mo., handed up an indictment Friday accusing
DocX of 136 counts of forgery in the preparation of documents used to evict
financially strained borrowers from their homes. Lorraine O. Brown, the
company’s founder and former president, was indicted on the same charges.

Employees of DocX, a unit of Lender Processing Services of Jacksonville,
Fla., executed and notarized millions of mortgage documents for big banks
and loan servicers over the years. Lender Processing closed the company in
April 2010, after evidence emerged of apparent forgeries in these
documents, a practice now called robo-signing.

Chris Koster, the Missouri attorney general, will prosecute the case. “The
grand jury indictment alleges that mass-produced fraudulent signatures on
notarized real estate documents constitutes forgery,” Mr. Koster said in a
statement. “Today’s indictment reflects our firm conviction that when you
sign your name to a legal document, it matters.”

Mr. Koster said his office’s investigation was continuing. This suggests he
may hope to persuade Ms. Brown to cooperate in his investigation of the
parent company. If convicted, Ms. Brown could face up to seven years in
prison for each forgery count. DocX could be fined up to $10,000 for each
forgery conviction.

Scott Rosenblum, a lawyer at Rosenblum, Schwartz, Rogers & Glass who
represents DocX said: “We have not had an opportunity to review the
indictment at this point. The company intends to enter a plea of not
guilty.”

According to the indictment, Ms. Brown acted “knowingly in concert with
DocX and its employees” to mislead and defraud the Boone County recorder of
deeds. The documents central to the indictments were deeds of release,
which eliminate a previous claim on an asset. Such releases are typically
issued when a mortgage has been paid off.

A lawyer for Ms. Brown said that she intends to enter a not guilty plea and
that she had no criminal intent.

Since evidence of pervasive foreclosure improprieties emerged, state
officials have mostly brought civil suits against the institutions and law
firms that filed the fraudulent documents. Individuals in Nevada, for
example, have been charged with notary fraud, but beyond that matter,
criminal cases arising from foreclosure practices have been uncommon.

The Missouri grand jury found that the person whose name appeared on 68
documents executed on behalf of a lender — someone named Linda Green — was
not the person who had signed the papers. The documents were submitted to
the Boone County recorder of deeds as though they were genuine, Mr. Koster
said.

A recent civil lawsuit against Lender Processing by the attorney general of
Nevada found that former workers at one of its divisions had described
their work as “surrogate signers.” One worker who was quoted in the
complaint said she had been paid $11 an hour and told that her job was “to
sign somebody else’s signature on documents.” The person said she had
signed roughly 2,000 documents a day for months, according to the lawsuit.

In addition to deed releases, DocX surrogate signers routinely executed
assignments of mortgage, which reflect changes in ownership.

The indictment is only the latest legal assault on the company and its
parent, Lender Processing. In August 2011, American Home Mortgage
Servicing, a large loan servicer, sued Lender Processing contending that
more than 30,000 residential mortgages that it had handled across the
country contained “improper execution, notarization and recording of
assignments of mortgage.” DocX executed such paperwork for American Home
from April 2008 through November 2009, the lawsuit said.

Last April, Lender Processing signed a consent order with the nation’s top
financial regulators, agreeing to remediate improperly executed mortgage
documents and to correct its default business practices. Michelle Kersch, a
Lender Processing spokeswoman, said recently that the company now executed
documents “with stringent controls in place” to ensure compliance with all
rules.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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