Baton Rouge Real Estate: Understanding and Avoiding Mortgage Fraud
The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting article: Mortgage Fraud: Understanding And Avoiding It . Here’s a snippet below:
“Ethical violations and criminal activities in various industries have affected our economy over the past few decades, particularly in the banking, financial and housing sectors. In this article we examine the complex ethical and criminal issues surrounding mortgage fraud. Fraud in its simplest form is deliberate misrepresentation and deception. Fraud in action means that one deceives another by misrepresenting information, facts and figures.
What is Mortgage Fraud?
Mortgage fraud is not just predatory lending practices that target certain borrowers. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) mortgage fraud is “material misstatement, misrepresentation or omission relating to the property or potential mortgage relied on by an underwriter or lender to fund, purchase or insure a loan.” With this working definition we see that mortgage fraud can be committed by both individual borrowers and industry professionals.“
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/04/21/investopedia5882.DTL#ixzz0loEvmD3B
Appraisal fraud was and is rampant in this country. We find appraisal fraud in four out of every five mortgage transactions we examine.