One 96-Year-Old's Mortgage Fraud Nightmare

from Mother Jones:



There is a term of art that was often used during the mortgage boom: "I'll be gone, you'll be gone," or "IBGYBG." In the mortgage business, it meant that however bad or risky or outright fraudulent a mortgage was, the person who originated it didn't have to worry—he'd have sold it and moved on long before the borrower was the wiser. The people to whom broker sold the mortgage wouldn’t be held responsible, either—after all, they weren't responsible for the fraud.

Lillie Mae Washington, who is 96 and lives in West Los Angeles, knows all too much about IBGYBG. Since September 2008, when Washington first sued her mortgage servicer, lender, escrow agent, and others for mortgage fraud, she has been trapped in a legal hell. She has represented herself, been represented pro bono, and now pays a lawyer to handle her case. The suit has been handled by at least seven judges, and the docket runs 104 documents long in federal court alone.

In all that time, no one that Washington has sued has argued that her mortgage was entirely by-the-book. It’s just that no one cares that it probably wasn't.

That includes Ocwen, Washington's mortgage servicer, which she says has been trying for over a year to evict her from the home where she has lived for nearly four decades. Washington paid Ocwen—a giant company that services hundreds of thousands of mortgages in all 50 states, often on behalf of big Wall Street banks that hold the mortgages—as long as she could afford to, but the payments were more than three times higher than what she expected when she signed the mortgage documents. A judge's mediation order temporarily stopped Washington from being kicked out late last month, but her lawyer is far from confident that she won't be asked to leave again. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/96-year-old-foreclosure-ocwen