Robosigned Documents Continue To Litter Courthouses, Recording Offices Nationwide, Fueling Ongoing Real Estate 'Chain-Of-(Crappy)Title' Deterioration

The Associated Press reports:

• Mortgage industry employees are still signing documents they haven't read and using fake signatures more than eight months after big banks and mortgage companies promised to stop the illegal practices that led to a nationwide halt of home foreclosures.



• County officials in at least three states say they have received thousands of mortgage documents with questionable signatures since last fall, suggesting that the practices, known collectively as "robo-signing," remain widespread in the industry.

***

• The county officials say the problem could be even worse than what they're reporting. That's because they are working off lists of known robo-signed names, such as Linda Green and Crystal Moore, that were identified during the investigation that began last fall. Officials suspect that other names on documents they have received since then are also robo-signed.

***

• The legal issues are grave, deeds officials across the country say. At worst, legal experts say, the document debacle has opened the property system to legal liability well beyond the nation's foreclosure crisis.



• So someone buying a home and trying to obtain title insurance might be delayed or denied if robo-signed documents turn up in the property's history. That's because forged signatures call into question who owns mortgages and the properties they are attached to.



• "The banks have completely screwed up property records," says L. Randall Wray, an economics professor and senior scholar at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.(1)

For more, see AP Exclusive: Mortgage 'robo-signing' goes on (if link expires, TRY HERE).

(1) For more on the crappy title problem in connection with the filing of bogus land documents and improperly foreclosing on homes, see:

• Daily Finance: Why the Foreclosure Mess Settlement Proposal Can't Fix the Damage,
• Naked Capitalism: On the Clouded Title Mess and the Difficulties of Cleaning It Up.