'Sewer Service' Suspicions Linked To S. Florida Foreclosure Mill; Court Filings Of "Lost Summons" Affidavits Skyrocket In Jacksonville Area

In Duval County, Florida, The Florida Times Union reports:

• [E]ven the summons, the simple but important legal notice required to inform homeowners that they are being foreclosed on, has not been immune to the massive problems surrounding what has become known in Florida and across the nation as the foreclosure mess. The Times-Union has reviewed documents where the same name with obviously different signatures was used to certify that papers were served to the homeowner.

• While there is no simple way to know how often every type of irregularity occurs, there is documentation showing a sharp rise in one narrow area of concern. Instances where summonses entrusted to servers have been reported as lost, once fairly rare, have skyrocketed, making it harder to document the fate of important paperwork. From barely more than 100 annually six years ago, more than 2,000 summonses have been lost in Duval County in each of the last two years. Critics attribute the problems to both sloppiness and fraud.

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• An affidavit of service - the legal document required to verify that the summons was served properly - would be filed when the summons hadn't been served, [ex-paralegal Tammie Lou Kapusta for the foreclosure mill law office of David Stern] said.(1)

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• The process server in the case of both Jeffs and Browne was ProVest LLC, the Tampa process server that is located in the same building as Stern in Plantation. It was also ProVest that said it served three summonses on a Middleburg foreclosure case. Each return of service was signed by a Julie Parker, certifying that she had served the papers, or had tried to serve them and failed. But each of three signatures was different. Efforts to reach Parker were unsuccessful.

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• When a summons is served, the server keeps the original and turns it back in with the notice of service that becomes part of the court file. But in recent years, something's happened to a lot of those original summonses: They've been lost. The number of "affidavits of lost summons," the court document that must be filed in such a case, has skyrocketed in recent years.

For more, see Fraud in foreclosure summons a disturbing trend in Duval County (Summonses are being misplaced or forged by servers; critics say sloppiness and fraud leading to sudden spike).

A 2008 report, Justice Disserved, documents the victimization of lawsuit defeandants by improper service of process to those who ultimately had money judgments unknowingly entered against them, often to devastating effect.

Go here for other "sewer service" posts.

(1) Go here for the Deposition of Tammie Lou Kapusta.