Feds have filed 151 criminal mortgage fraud cases so far this year
Now that the Justice Department is winding down criminal prosecutions related to the stock option pricing scandal (see colleague Chris O’Brien’s column today), the Feds can free up more resources to investigate a far more wide-reaching scandal — mortgage fraud.
We pass along this link, passed along to us by the Computer Assisted Reporting & Research e-mail list out of the University of Louisville, to a database being compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, that is tracking federal investigative efforts surrounding the scandal that is central to our present financial morass.
The latest available data from the Justice Department show that for the first ten months of FY 2008, the federal government reported filing 151 criminal mortgage fraud cases. The DOJ has only recently created a category for tracking such cases. Because of natural court delays, however, the government said that only 37 cases of this type were completed in the same ten-month period. In the months to come, TRAC will be providing regular updates on every referral acted upon by each U.S. Attorney’s Office and what the ultimate outcomes are.
There were 69 mortgage-fraud investigations in Florida, made up 46 percent of the total. There were 19 in California, identified as involving cases in central and southern California.
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Mortgage fraud and mortgage lending practices have been in the news in the last few weeks as the U.S. District Court of appeals ruled on two controversial mortgage settlement charges and the FBI announced a striking increase in and a crackdown on mortgage related fraud. And the bubble continues to float as the Commerce Department announces yet another month of strong new house sales.