Stealing homes with a pen

"If you add all those up, I don’t think there’s a loan in America that is not touched by this in some way."--David Dayen

"When I pay it off, what will I have, [is] the most famous broken chain of title in the country."--Lynn Szymoniak.

"The millions facing foreclosure [are] not facing foreclosure just because of individual actions."--Malcolm Chu

This was a Netroots Nation panel held "in a room with no streaming, and President Obama is holding a press conference to conflict with it." Marci Wheeler's rush transcript (liveblog) shows possibly the best overview of the homeownership disaster I've seen.

David Dayen kicked off the panel with a catalog of types of housing fraud:

1. Origination fraud (liar loans, discriminatory, paper fraud) 
2. Appraisal fraud. Then 
3. Securitization fraud, failure to convey the mortgages to the trust properly. 
4. Investor fraud, putting bad mortgages into packages willingly, and not telling the investors. 
5. MERS, which is a giant tax avoidance scheme. 
6. Servicer fraud—fee pyramiding. HUD did test of 35 loans from, of the 35 actual price of mortgage could not be verified on 34. 
7. HAMP.  
8. Force place insurance fraud. Servicer buys at a huge price and make mortgage holder pay for it. 
9. Foreclosure mill. 
10. Robosigning. 
11. Breaking and entering.

Panel information: Moderator, David Dayen. Panelists: former TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky, community organizer Malcolm Chu, and whistleblower Lynn Szymoniak. Read Marci Wheeler's liveblog post at Emptywheel. Video is promised for later today.