Mortgage fraud

Fintech adoption among real estate and title agents is accelerating, though their optimism on the housing market has tanked, according to First American Financial Corp.

The scheme's perpetrators were based in Irvine, Calif., the FTC said in a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland.

Three people who fraudulently obtained $9.3 million in mortgage loans involving homes in Modesto, Patterson and Lathrop, Calif., have received multiyear federal prison sentences.

UBS Group sold tens of billions of dollars' worth of residential mortgage-backed securities by "knowingly and repeatedly" making false and fraudulent statements to investors about the loans backing those trusts, the U.S. Justice Department said in a civil suit filed Thursday.

A former instructor at the Purvis Real Estate Training Institute in Fort Worth, Texas. was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison for running a Ponzi scheme that robbed investors of more than $1.2 million.

Growing home prices plus rising interest rates are putting a damper on mortgage lending, which pushes the market to seek out less qualified borrowers and increases the risk of fraud.

A Queens, N.Y., man who helped defraud mortgage lending units at Bank of America, Chase Bank and AmTrust is now facing 21 months in prison and three years of supervised release.

There was a 1.3% uptick in mortgage application defects in September from the previous month, with states affected by Hurricane Florence showing preliminary spikes in activity following the storm, according to First American.

Larger mortgage companies are paying less than other creditors when fraud occurs, but the expense is still detracting enough from their revenue to cause concern.

Industry downsizing resulted in an increase in critical defects found in closed mortgages as loan packaging errors continued to rise during the first quarter, according to Aces Risk Management.