Bid & Cure Statements Filed During Foreclosure Process With Four County Public Trustees The Focus Of Colorado AG Mortgage Fraud Probers' 'Paper Chase'

In Denver, Colorado, The Denver Post reports:

• Mortgage fraud investigators with the Colorado Attorney General's office have gathered documents filed with at least four county public trustees' offices by some of the state's largest foreclosure law firms, according to several people familiar with the request.
  
  
• Trustees in four counties confirmed they each provided hundreds of pages of documents — mostly bid and cure statements associated with foreclosures spanning a five-year period — in response to a request by the attorney general's consumer protection division.
  
  
• Deputy Attorney General Jan Zavislan, who heads that office's consumer protection division, declined to comment about the scope or nature of the request, or even to say it was an inquiry or formal investigation. "That's a very big no comment," Zavislan said Friday.

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• Trustees in Boulder, Jefferson, Arapahoe and El Paso counties confirm they provided sets of 100 documents for each of seven law firms — Vaden, Dale & Decker, Castle Stawiarski, Hopp, Aronowitz & Mecklenburg , Medved and Janeway — covering the period of 2008 to the present, according to a copy of an email sent to the Boulder County public trustee and obtained by The Denver Post under the state's open records law.

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• The request was focused on bid and cure statements attorneys file in a foreclosure case. Each statement includes charges the law firm says must be paid — by the homeowner in the case of a cure or, in the case of a bid, by the winner of a public auction when a property is sold.
  
  
• The bid sheet is a bank's offer for the auction of a foreclosed property, a requirement by law. If there are no other bidders, the bank retains the property and reduces by their bid amount what a homeowner owes them. Sometimes lenders will bid the exact amount owed.
  
  
• Cures are filed with trustees when homeowners indicate they would like to stop the foreclosure process by paying what they owe. The cure bill will include charges such as outstanding amounts on a mortgage, accrued interest and a variety of other fees such as attorneys costs and property inspections.

For more, see Colorado AG requests foreclosure lawyers' documents from 4 counties.