A National Fraud Database Emerges After All

The MBA put out a 'request for proposal' to build a national fraud database only to later shelve the idea, but MERSCORP Inc. and Interthinx have moved ahead, deciding the issue is too important to ignore. At the Mortgage Bankers Association's annual convention the pair launched a national fraud prevention database that will allow lenders to seek, identify, and share suspected fraudulent activity on loan applications from the point of origination. The companies said MERS FraudALERT will help identify and prevent fraud through the sharing and reporting of key data among the more than 62 million loans currently registered on the MERS system. Lenders can submit loan application data and incident reports with suspected or confirmed fraudulent activity to a centralized database. The system will then notify other lenders who have connections to the loans, alerting them of possible problems.