Fla. Foreclosure Mill Voluntarily Withdraws Lawsuit After Being Caught Using Dubious Mortgage Assignment; Efforts Begin Again With Different Law Firm

In Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports:

• After months of wrangling with CitiMortgage, Dennis and Joyce Brown got fed up and hired an attorney to fight CitiMortgage's foreclosure on their Lauderdale Lakes home. The Browns claim they are victims of fabricated documents used to foreclose after CitiMortgage failed to credit them for mortgage payments.(1) "They ran my blood pressure up so bad," said Dennis Brown, who hired Fort Lauderdale lawyer Kenneth Eric Trent to fight the foreclosure.

• CitiMortgage and its lawyers, David Stern Law Offices, voluntarily withdrew the case against the Browns in Broward County Circuit Court on June 16. But the Browns can't rest easy. Recently, they've received new foreclosure letters from another lawyer representing CitiMortgage.

• The Browns' story is just one example of foreclosures resulting from allegedly fraudulent mortgage assignments and other tactics that "eliminate due process for the homeowner," Trent said.(2)

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• University of Utah law professor Christopher Peterson said MERS mortgage processing system goes against long-standing principles of property law in assigning rights to a note or mortgage. He said the "owner" of a mortgage can't be the same as the "agent" representing the homeowner, for example. Yet MERS records "false documents" with names of people who are not executives of the registry system, but often paralegals and clerks of law firms, he said. "It's an extremely controversial and arguably fraudlent practice," Peterson said.(3)

For more, see Homeowner fights foreclosure in lawsuit claiming documents are fraudulent.

(1) Reportedly, one of the issue in the Browns' case is the signature on the assignment of Brown's mortgage, giving rights to CitiMortgage, Trent said. The signature is by Cheryl Samons, who is identified as "assistant secretary of Merscorp" when, in reality, Samons is nothing more than an employee of the David J. Stern law office, the story states.

(2) Reportedly, Trent also is suing Stern and Stern's Plantation law firm in federal court in a separate case with similar allegations (see Lawsuit claims that Florida's largest foreclosure firm faked documents). In that lawsuit, on behalf of Oakland Park homeowner Ignacio Damian Figueroa, Trent contends that Stern and a mortgage registration firm generated fraudulent mortgage documents that are intentionally ambiguous to cloud the real ownership of Figueroa's mortgage note, the story states.

For the lawsuit, see Figueroa v. Merscorp, et al.

(3) For Professor Peterson's 46-page article on MERS, see Foreclosure, Subprime Mortgage Lending, and the Mortgage Electronic Registration System.