FBI Commiserates With Lenders

The FBI says it feels the pain of every good mortgage business citizen who has ever turned suspicious activities into the agency for investigation and received no response, even months later."We share your frustration," G-man Bill Stern said at SourceMedia's Mortgage Fraud Conference in Las Vegas. "Agents who devote hundreds of hours investigating cases that aren't prosecuted are frustrated, too." Mr. Stern's mournful statement was in answer to a participant who wanted to know why he never heard back from the FBI after his company had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to investigate possible corruption. A supervisory special agent who is the mortgage fraud point man in Washington that decides how the FBI's 56 field offices can best focus their limited resources, Mr. Stern didn't have a direct answer for the questioner, who asked what it takes to get the agency to investigate a possible crime. The man said that while his company lost $6.2 million, the state was able to gain six felony plea agreements with the perpetrators. Mr. Stern responded that the amount of the loss seemed sizable enough to warrant the FBI's interest. But he said he wasn't familiar with the case and couldn't provide a more specific answer, other than to note that "all cases can't be prosecuted."