The Foreclosure Machine is Hard to Stop

By MARK ANDERSON

After a seven-year battle with the debt-servicing firm Nationstar, an October 2018 judgment was handed down against Rebecca Crimone, a Mercer County, Pa., mother of three who had challenged the validity of her mortgage loan but ultimately lost the house that she, her husband and the kids had called home sweet home, farmland, horse, two-acre lake and all.

Now, they’ve been forced to live in the basement of a church while contemplating how things could have come to the point where even paying off all outstanding claims on the home still was not enough to stop the nation’s growing foreclosure machine.

If you think that sounds far-fetched, think again.

“The judgment was handed to us by a misled jury for approximately $174,000 and the Sheriff’s sale had been set for July 1, 2019,” Crimone told this writer. “Well, we secured a buyer and closing arrangement that produced proceeds with which we were able to pay off not only that judgement amount, but also the total payoff amount which closed on June 28. So, the sheriff sale was postponed.”

She explained that the payoff, including added fees, was ordered through the closing firm of Dillion McCandless and issued by Nationstar’s attorney, Andrew Markowitz of McCabe, Conway & Wiesberg.

“The final payoff of over $190,000 was received and cashed by Nationstar who has ... contacted us via mail and email several times to notify us that there has been no pay off,” Mrs. Crimone said, understandably shaken over this sudden turnaround.

Nationstar, she added, “has continued its lies,” stating on the phone to her on Aug. 2 that no payoff was issued on her home.

“This was proven false by documentation from Dillion McCandless, which includes a copy of the check that Nationstar cashed and also which stated it was a payoff on our loan number,” Crimone said. “Now, Nationstar has scheduled a Sheriff’s sale for Sept. 9 and refuses to apply the cashed funds to pay off the so-called loan.”

Citing the core scandal of the matter, she said: “These Sheriff’s sales are happening without proper authorization. The sheriffs will tell you, ‘We don’t take anything from you; we do whatever the debt collector tells us. You can show us all the evidence you want of the retired debt. It doesn’t matter. The debt collector has the authority.’”

Crimone is hardly alone. In Chenango County, N.Y., Greene resident and businessman Carl DaCosta has experienced much the same thing. As of this writing, DaCosta had been evicted by Sheriff Ernest Cutting Jr. and has had to live out of his car.

In court, DaCosta produced copious documentation that there was no outstanding debt on his home, on top of the fact that he and Crimone both have produced evidence of forged and fraudulent promissory notes and other documents — something that participating judges have refused to hear in court.

Yet, in an age when the chain of custody on original mortgage notes is forever lost when those notes are bundled into security offerings, substitute notes that often contain unauthentic copy-and-paste signatures are being peddled in court by the attorneys for debt-collection law firms and tolerated by judges — amid allegations that some judges and sheriffs are “on the take” in what amounts to a “legalized” house-flipping racket where debt-collection law firms make tens of millions of dollars a year defrauding people out of their homes, regardless of whether the homeowners technically owe on their homes or not.

Meanwhile, when banks make loans, they part with nothing, but charge interest and are poised to foreclose or transfer your mortgage to a debt-servicing firm (not a bank) that may seize your home via this sleight-of-hand. A typical bank’s ledgers, by the way, show no decrease in bank assets when loans are made, nor are depositors’ funds accessed. Simple computer keystrokes conjure up loans in the form of demand-deposit accounts. And the slightest slip on the part of the homeowner — a late payment, or, God forbid, a request for modified loan to make things easier — may be all it takes for the average American to get the supreme shaft.

Veteran journalist Mark Anderson edited an in-depth, available book on these matters, “Universal Bankruptcy & Economic Bondage.” Email truthhound2@yahoo.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2019

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