One of my RSS feeds carried a story today telling about how a new type of mortgage fraud is now emerging. Companies are now starting to solicit business from the mortgage lending industry that offer to cure all their problems in trying to foreclose on defaulted mortgages. They offer to go over the loan documents and the history of loan transfers from lender to lender and prepare and submit the assignments to the County recorder's offices that should have been done by the various lenders in the first place to show a complete chain of transfers as the lender(s) should have done in the first place but failed to do. That way it will appear to the courts that all of the paperwork was properly done when the lenders go to court to foreclose. They will also prepare lost note affidavits and any other types of paperwork the lenders have fraudulently failed to perform. They claim to be able to cover any and all mistakes the lenders ever made in the lending, SEC filing and other necessary paperwork they need to assure a successful foreclosure. They even offer to doctor up the notes and provide the proper allonges even if some of the lenders in the title chain are now out of business. Real nice folks we need to become acquainted with and learn how to spot and be able to expose their phony documents.
Have you clicked on the link in my signature line? It leads to a Yahoo! pipes page which is a bit slow loading but once it loads it reveals at least 7 pages of nothing but articles and links to the full story where they came from.Lots of them are stories about foreclosures and much, much more. You should check it out. Yahoo! pipes is a pretty neat deal once you learn how to use it. All you have to do is start out with a few different sources or RSS feeds that appeal to you. Once you have 4 or 5 or even more you can connect them to a union. All of the feeds are then fed from the union to the pipe output. You can insert filters to filter stuff out of the feeds you don't want or are not interested in. There are many ways to make the feeds do what you want them to do. Once you have the output you want then you can use it in web site links, or sig lines like I do. You can also have the output sent to you by email so you can read the output that way. Once you get the hang of it most of the work becomes a simple copy and paste operation. You can also put it into a display widget and put that on your web site or blog too. Not only does it provide good information to your visitors but it also helps SEO too. Another thing you might want to do is to use Google's urchin tracker and a good site map. If you do use a good site map you want to be sure to keep it up to date and with no dead links. Urchin is nothing more than a bit of code that goes into your header and tells Google who owns the web site it is posted to. That also helps with SEO. Learn about Google web master tools. There are a great many of them and they can tell you a great deal about which pages your visitors go to and how long they stay there as well as what other links they click on, how they found your web site and where they went after they left. That's very valuable information for a web master as well as the sales people. I notice that you aren't using either video or podcasts on your web site. Those are becoming very popular with the visitors now and they are getting more and more into watching videos on the web. Search engines are now able to spider videos and podcasts and decipher what content they contain and use what they learn to make listings in their servings to the surfing public. Videos and podcasts both help with page rank and SERPS. Another valuable aspect of RSS is that you can easily make a feed for just about any web site. For instance I have a feed set up for this and several other message boards so I can tell what is going on at any time without actually having to go to the web pages or forums themselves. You can also have RSS feeds sent to your cell phone so you can keep up with what is going on even in the parking lot waiting for the wife to do her shopping. And it is all free. Never costs a red cent.
Countrywide got blown out of the water for "reconstructing" a few letters. Anybody "reconstructing" notes or assignments or what-have-you is bound for prison, and it will be well-deserved.
The countrywide scandal now seems to have been even more pervasive than originally thought. Neil Garfield who is a well respected researcher in mortgage fraud investigation and does a blog he calls Living Lies weblog came up with the information that Countrywide was one of the creators of MERS or Mortgage Electronic Registry Systems. At first glance that don't seem like any earth shaking news but it is because MERS has illegally foreclosed on millions of homes since their formation. Countrywide and most of the other large lenders carried clauses in their loan agreements that stipulated that MERS would be the servicing agent for the loan and the notes were ostensibly signed over to MERS immediately but that never happened. MERS has never owned one single note nor ever owned any mortgages. People such as Larry R. of Florida and many other well known researchers have been fighting MERS for years to keep their homes. Most of them have had their loans foreclosed on years ago but are still there and still fighting. Neil Garfield is a realtor in California. He has finally come up with the proof that the MERS scandal has been kept quiet because of the fact that it's president and founder was also the president and founder of Countrywide who has or had close ties with important congress critters on the Senate Financial Services Committee Countrywide and MERS are probably the #1 cause of the financial meltdown going on today. It is an interesting story that is just now breaking. If you are interested you can either click on the link I just provided or my signature line and read the story for yourself. Of course, my sig line gets it's stories from Neil Garfield through Neil's RSS feed which I feed into Yahoo pipes where it gets combined with many other feeds so anyone clicking on my sig line can keep up on the latest. Of course, anyone else can do the same thing by learning how to use RSS and Yahoo pipes. It don't take any genius to learn how to do that. All very simple and easy to learn. Once you learn how to do it you can easily keep up with the latest on any topic, news item or person you choose. You can also include your local weather, sports items, stock markets or anything else you choose and never have to actually spend your time going to individual web pages or blogs unless you want to. Another nice thing about it is that you will never lose a valuable link even if your computer crashes. You can build multiple pipes for different types of subjects. Its far better than using bookmarks because if your computer crashes you lose your bookmarks and have to start all over again usually losing most of them.