This evasiveness and denying what you said only four months ago get very tiresome. Below is what you said back then:

>1) As to the "silence" you refer too....if there aren't any
>topics here on the mortgage front, then the topic isn't
>being discussed..you DO understand that, don't you?

The "silence" is from you my friend.
Here's a thread from Jan 08 I started about investigation of FRAUD on the LENDER side (insider trading and accounting frau), and you try to bury it with offtopic comments about BORROWERS and FORECLOSURES in general - not the topic of LENDER FRAUD.
I never said appraisal fraud was the main or only mode of fraud - I said it should be easier to detect and prosecute. How dishonest of you.
Here you disparage my (correct) comments on appraisal fraud which was already being widely reported by industry insiders.

http://forum.myredbook.com/cgi-bin/dcforum2/dcboard.pl?az=show_thread&om=33307&forum=DCForumID14#15

>>If you mean limited in scale, that was true until it stopped being true.
>>But in recent years it is an open secret that the bogus lenders had stables of compliant appraisers overstating values, and bogus loan agents colluding in misrepresenting the incomes (or lack of) and occupations of buyers.
>>For Christ's sake, people were chronicling it or confessing to it on blogs.~

>Yeah...go ahead and hang your hat on the one blog by the one idiot. >Leave it to you to take a SINGLE borrower and make it sound like it's what the whole world did! LOL

>And you wonder WHY people blast you for being dishonest and distorting everything? It's no mystery from where I sit.

[I could trivially have done a Google and cited the RE industry sources on appraisal fraud.]

But that wasn't even necessary, because in fact, back in Nov 07, LD posted this, so you knew the insider reports of appraisal fraud were not due to "one single blogger in Jan 08":
http://forum.myredbook.com/cgi-bin/dcforum2/dcboard.pl?az=show_thread&om=32361&forum=DCForumID14

"We get pressured every single day to inflate our values," said Dan Tosh, principal at Tosh & Associates, an appraisal firm in Brentwood. "We get people telling us we'll never work again, or they won't pay us because we won't play ball."

New York's attorney general sued a leading appraisal management firm Thursday, saying it had knuckled under to a big bank's pressure to pump up home prices. The practice might have helped fuel the current mortgage crisis and the dramatic home price appreciation of the past few years.

Many real estate experts say appraisal inflation is pervasive in an industry in which pressure to close deals is all-consuming.

"This makes things such as Enron and WorldCom look small by comparison," said Ted Faravelli, executive director of the California Association of Real Estate Appraisers and principal at San Jose's T.E. Faravelli & Associates, an appraisal firm. "It was an epidemic."

In a nationwide survey released early this year, 90 percent of 1,200 appraisers said they had felt "uncomfortable pressure" to adjust property values. Mortgage brokers were named as the most common culprits, followed by real estate agents, consumers, lenders and appraisal management companies. The increase in pressure was dramatic compared with that found in a similar survey in 2003, when 55 percent of appraisers reported feeling pressured.

"Pressure on appraisers reaches pandemic proportions," said David Hutton, senior editor at October Research Corp.... "The New York lawsuit ... may be just the tip of the iceberg."

>I hate to tell you this, because you have a rather "unique"
>view of the world...but your own links undermine your
>contentions here:
>
>1) Your first link plainly says that TILA fraud is the major
>issue.

That has fuck-all relevance to your prior incorrect comments insistign appraisal fraud was not widespread.

>2) The ABC link plainly shows that "mortgage fraud is most
>concentrated in the north central region of the United
>States".
>
>We do not live in that area, do we?

My god, the HJ evasion machine is on full afterburner...
Did anyone suggest we lived in that region? Since noone suggested that, you have no point at all.
Is the phrase "I was wrong" impossible for you to swallow?

>
>3) The FBI report breaks fraud in to two categories:
>
>A) One for "housing" where applicants (or their agents) lie
>to get them in to a house
>
>B) Fraud for "profit", which covers the appraisal fraud you
>mentioned.
>
>The FBI report, which you obviously did not read, does not
>quantify what percentage of fraud is "appraisal fraud", and
>merely lists it as ONE of the "emerging" RE scams to come to
>light during their probe.

I did read it and that's precisely what it said.

Hence, when you disparaged my comments about appraisal fraud, you were wrong. Let's hear you admit that.

>IN FACT, THE FBI TABLE ONLY LISTS lists ONE
>AREA...DETROIT....HAVING "CREDIT AND VALUE" AS A TOP TYPE OF
>MISREPRESENTATION!!!!!!!!!!

Wow HJ you're really clutching at straws.

>At some point you'll realize that a large majority of the
>people claiming "fraud" knew exactly what was going on, and
>signed docs willingly.

Again, you keep trying to blur LENDER fraud and BORROWER fraud, you seem to be programmed to keep repeating that. It is a strawman to suggest it is one thing or the other.
As the FBI article made very clear, most of the their prosecutions are NOT against borrowers. And anyway, they have a thrsehold of $500,000 for losses (which most borrowers won't surpass).
And it is absolutely not necessary for the BORROWER to intentionally commit fraud in order for the LENDER, LENDING BANK, LOAN AGENT, APPRAISER etc. to intentionally commit fraud. Simple enough for ya yet? How can you obfuscate that away?

First,

>>IN FACT, THE FBI TABLE ONLY LISTS lists ONE
>AREA...DETROIT....HAVING "CREDIT AND VALUE" AS A TOP TYPE OF
>MISREPRESENTATION!!!!!!!!!!

>Wow HJ you're really clutching at straws.

It seems to me that if you're building a national case around a local statistic, YOU'D be the one "really clutching at straws".

Second,

The stats you listed just talk about the INCREASE, not about fraud levels. If mad cow disease doubled this year, it would still not be a significant problem (other than to those who have it).

I never ever said appraisal fraud was the #1 mode of fraud.
I DID say appraisal fraud was a) widespread (which you then wrongly attacked, but now it's proven) and b) pretty clear to spot when you see it happening, and when you can get testimony from people in the lending chain who show how there's a giant quid pro quo (and LD's article quoted tons of financial-industry insiders saying precisely that).

In our long-running skirmish on this, I noted how the FBI was slow to get in the game, and only started with more easily proveable crimes like accounting fraud and insider trading - not because they are the most widespread, but because their prosecution is more cut-and-dried than white-collar fraud in general.

For sure, TILA violations in which the loan agent and/or borrower misrepresented the borrower's income/credit/assets/SSN/occupancy are going to be more common (by instance count, which is probably less proportional to total $ losses). And as has been commented, in cases where either or both loan agent and borrower did this, intent will be hard to prove, and also most cases will have losses way below the FBI's threshold. Hence most instances of TILA fraud are way too small and tricky to presecute. We covered that months ago, you're behind the curve.

Why don't you go back to pretending we would have to be in Detroit to make the findings on appraisal fraud relevant??
You two were suggesting because in 2007 27% of pending FBI mtg fraud investigations were in North-Central, yet "only" 23% in the West... so fucking what boys? And aren't houses more expensive in the West anyway... what a load of crap that is.
By the same dumbass logic the FBI shouldn't be interested in the portion of armed robbers who don't kill their victims, and so on.

Then, why not for a change impress us with your expert knowledge by actually commenting constructively on the FBI's report on mortgage fraud... and try to distinguish facts from your political ideology that it is just plain impossible for the govt to handle mortgage-related problems without impinging on the sanctity of the mortgage contract.
That's just plain bullshit - there's ten billion useful things the govt can do that do not constitute interfering between lender and borrower.
Prosecuting all types of mortgage fraud vigilantly and aggressively is one very obvious thing. Banning wrongdoers from the industry for life, where possible, is another.

One question which you should have a good answer for: I would have thought misrepresenting occupancy was even more blatant than income and value. Borrower either lives there or he/she doesn't. I commented on the more extreme cases of jobless borrower with multiple vacant investment properties for sale (flipping gone wrong).
What is the responsibility of the LENDER to verify that what the borrower and loan agent told them is true?
Is there really not any responsibility on the lender to retrospectively do a spot-check say six months later and see if the property is unoccupied, occupied by renters, derelict, missing half its copper...?

For starters, the fact is, local statistics are very often EXCELLENT proxies for national statistics - and this is one such occassion.

And second, the fact is, Mad Cow is a better metaphor than you ever could have dreamed of for the sub-prime crisis - because of the fact that it's consequences are so far out in time from the proximate cause of the disease that once one actually can size up the effects, it's FAR to late to put in any ameliorative process in place to prevent the spread of the damage around the population - and virtually all that can be done is to pray that the unchecked damage of the disease does not run rampant through the society and destroys it.

Why? Because you say so? Ha!!! Show how DETROIT is a national proxy. If not, this is just another in a long string of baseless opinions.