Featured Harris Real Estate University Guest Post…'Are Mortgage Scams On The Rise'

This guest post is brought to you by The Digerati Life, a site that covers all topics on personal finance. Make sure you check out her Zecco review and other coverage of online stock brokers. This time, she tackles the subject of mortgage fraud.

Currently, the number of fraud cases of the mortgage industry is rising at an alarming rate. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) strongly recognizes mortgage fraud as one of the top crimes calling for most of the bureau’s concentration.

In a statement released in July 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation stated that mortgage fraud Suspicious Activity Reports or SARs cited to legal enforcement went up 36% to 63,713 during FY 2008 in comparison to 46,717 reports in fiscal year 2007.

Though the total dollar loss as a result of mortgage scams is indefinite, financial institutions stated losses totaling a minimum of $1.4 billion, a growth of 83.4% from fiscal year 2007.

The Assistant Director of FBI Criminal Investigative Division, Kevin Parkins stated that fraud cases in the mortgage industry are detrimental to financial institutions, borrowers and homeowners. The FBI — along with the law enforcement agencies, industry and regulatory associates — continues to chase architects of mortgage fraud schemes.

Individual states have been engaged in pursuing mortgage scam cases. The Attorney General of Texas, Greg Abbott, has stated that mortgage scams, according to one review, are the quickest growing professional crime in the United States. For an extensive period, identity theft had the honor of being the fastest growing white collar crime.

Abbott has stated that the blend of tough times and unbelievable amount of money in the mortgage industry has caused the crime to grow. Anytime there is a huge amount of money that is heavily transacted in any specific matter, you can expect this to attract a criminal element, or what you’d call a scam factor.

Other important conclusions delivered in the FBI statement include the following:

• 63% (1,035) of all unfinished FBI mortgage scam probes during fiscal year 2008 involved dollar losses amounting to over $1 million. Over 3.1 million foreclosure filings were informed on around 2.43 million properties countrywide during fiscal year 2008, which is up 81% from fiscal year 2007 and 225% from fiscal year 2006.
• Since fiscal year 2008, the western part of the U.S. had the maximum number of pending FBI mortgage scam-related probes.
• The top 10 states with mortgage fraud cases in 2008 were Illinois, California, Georgia, Texas, Colorado, Ohio, Florida, Maryland, New York and Missouri.
• Massachusetts, Rhode Island, the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania were freshly detected as having considerable mortgage fraud issues.

Perpetrators have carried on using earlier strategies like builder-bailouts, property flipping, foreclosure recovery and short sales. Furthermore, as a reaction to stricter lending norms, they’ve used new plans like credit enhancements, reverse mortgage scams, condo conversion as well as pump and pay.

We owe it to ourselves to keep an eye on the possibility of mortgage fraud occurring on our watch. If you’re involved in lending transactions and suspect anything questionable, make sure to report it to the proper authorities!