Compliance

Origination software provider Ellie Mae released a package of new services and features this week to promote loan quality and efficiency in the loan file review process for investors and loan aggregators.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris is creating a task force aimed at cracking down on mortgage fraud in the country's largest state, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.

After Interthinx’s mortgage fraud risk report found that employment and income fraud increased by 30% in 2010, the provider of risk mitigation solutions has added new features to its FraudGuard tool.

The Detroit Police and Fire Retirement System filed a lawsuit against Paramount Limited LLC for committing a Ponzi scheme that defrauded millions of dollars from the system.

A New Jersey man who owned and operated two foreclosure rescue companies has pleaded guilty to his role in a mortgage fraud scheme in order to commit wire fraud and money laundering.

Homeowners can use a little known but increasingly popular provision of the bankruptcy code to eliminate second mortgages and avoid foreclosure. Statistics are hard to come by, but the provision has been used effectively on hundreds, if not thousands, of cases during the past two years.

Under the authority of the False Claims Act and other laws, the government is suing Deutsche Bank and its wholly owned subsidiary, MortgageIT, for years of reckless lending practices.

It is well documented that the discovery of fraud and abuse is far more frequently found through chance observation than through formal auditing and oversight, no matter how important those functions obviously are. However, our initial awareness that ethical or legal problems are occurring often has less to so with the actual observation of some type of error in judgment or indiscretion and more to do with some indistinct gut sense that things just don't feel right. Always trust that feeling.

A prominent realtor, her son and daughter-in-law pleaded guilty earlier this week to an expanding mortgage fraud that enabled them to buy expensive vacation homes at Alabama’s Gulf Shores using “straw borrowers” to qualify for credit union loans.

Once mortgage fraudsters find a chink in a lender's armor, they not only zero in on it, but they also pass it around to their fellow thieves, speakers at a conference in Las Vegas said.

AllRegs has created an online fraud prevention security resource that allows businesses to verify a customer’s identification during a transaction.

To improve its LoanSafe Fraud Manager platform, CoreLogic has integrated real-time identity risk insight from ID Analytics as part of its technological product.

A Cleveland company that offered to help homeowners avoid foreclosure on their homes has been sued by the Ohio Attorney General's office for failing to live up to its promises of debt relief.

Reported incidents of subscriber-verified mortgage fraud and misrepresentation by industry professionals have decreased from 2009 to 2010, according to a recent report by the LexisNexis Mortgage Asset Research Institute. Actual incidents, however, as opposed to reported, are believed to be up.

BrokerPriceOpinon.com has developed a solution for lenders, investors and insurers who are engaged in disputes over values on aged inventories of properties.

After 77 million Sony PlayStation Network users recently had their personal identifiable information breached, Equifax is advising consumers to look into a product that offers more than just a free fraud alert to prevent this from happening in the future.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia held that the Home Owner's Loan Act preempts state tort law claims alleging that Flagstar Bank FSB improperly represented itself as as a lender to collect brokerage fees on a home mortgage (Down v. Flagstar Bank F.S.B., E.D. Va., No. 3:10-cv-847, 4/4/11).

Wells Fargo & Co., in a new public filing, hiked its estimate for potential losses stemming from foreclosure-related litigation against the bank.

Space Coast Credit Union, which filed suit last week against Barclays Capital over CDOs the investment bank sold to Eastern Financial Florida CU, is expected to file similar suits over the next few weeks against other Wall Street firms in the 2009 failure of the one-time $2.4 billion credit union.

Freddie Mac said it may suffer $690 million of losses due to the bankruptcy and fraudulent activities of Taylor Bean Whitaker, a Florida-based lender that failed 18 months ago and became the subject of a large criminal investigation.