Monday, December 19, 2011

LPS, Confederates Next On Nevada AG Hit List As Foreclosure Document Assembly-Line Sweatshop Faces Robosigner Allegations In Civil Suit

In Las Vegas, Nevada, KLAS-TV Channel 8 reports:

  • Nevada's Attorney General is going after the nation's largest home default company. Lender Processing Services, or LPS, has its hand in tens of thousands of Nevada home evictions and foreclosures.


  • Initially, the Nevada Attorney General's office went after LPS's middle managers. Now, they're going after the top bosses claiming they lied under oath and created a company filled with fraud.


  • Former title officer Gary Trafford arrived from California to face a Nevada judge for the first time. While working for LPS, he's accused of managing a robo-signing scheme. He's charged with ordering notaries to forge hundreds of signatures a day. Trafford plead not guilty to a 606-count state indictment.


  • Both Trafford and fellow title officer Gerri Sheppard face trial in September. At the same time, Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto announces she's going after their bosses at LPS. She says she is focusing on LPS because they are a big player in the default servicing component of mortgages and their processes and procedures were violating laws.


  • "So, the civil action is to stop them, prohibit them from continuing to utilize the procedures that they've been using in violation of our law," Cortez Masto said.


  • She says employees were required to notarize and forge up to 4,000 documents a day. One confidential witness told investigators it didn't matter some of his notary co-workers "couldn't read English well because reading documents wasn't part of the job."

For more, see NV Attorney General Sues Company for Robo-Signing.

See also, the The Associated Press: Nev. AG, Fla. firm trade barbs on 'robo-signing':

  • "The robo-signing crisis in Nevada has been fueled by two main problems: chaos and speed," Masto said in a statement announcing the civil case had been filed Thursday in Clark County District Court.


  • "Former employees and industry players describe LPS as an assembly-line sweatshop, churning out documents and foreclosures as fast as new requests came in and punishing network attorneys who failed to keep up the pace," the statement said.

For the Nevada Attorney General lawsuit, see State of Nevada v. Lender Processing Services, Inc., et al.

For the Nevada AG press release, see Nevada Attorney General Sues Lender Processing Services For Consumer Fraud.

No comments: