Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Professional Mortgage Fraud Down 41 Percent, Overall Fraud Up 5 Percent

-The Real Estate Bloggers

If you are looking to get your mortgage broker to look the other way when applying for a loan, forget about it. The instances of mortgage fraud by professionals is down by 41 percent from 2009 to 2010. The days of liars loans going through and pressure by mortgage lenders to find a way of making the loan work have passed.

But there is a flip side to this. Mortgage fraud overall has increased. The misrepresentations and scams being committed overall is picking up as the economy continues to struggle. With 9 percent unemployment, and 18 percent underemployment, people are struggling. And when they are struggling they will do whatever it takes to look after themselves and their family.

And in this environment fraud will run rampant. If the options in someone’s mind is to commit a serious crime or scam a bank to put food on the table you know what the person will most likely do.

The institutions are getting wise to the costs of mortgage fraud also. Instead of just considering it a cost of doing business they are aggressively attacking the problem with new technology and analytics.

“Fraudsters thrive on inadequacies within lengthy loan-related processes and a lack of consistency across organizations and/or industries that help them hide their true motives,” the LexisNexis analysts said. “Technology has enabled faster loan production through automation, ease of processing, and analytics. Industry professionals have keen knowledge of those processes, which makes it much easier to manipulate protocols in place to thwart adverse activities.”

James said mortgage businesses “are quickly trying to implement new procedures to detect emerging frauds while, at the same time, focusing their energies on recovering the huge financial losses of recent years.”via Housing Wire

Mortgage fraud will always be around. There is too much money at stake and to be honest the penalties are low compared to other ways people could steal at this level. What is reassuring is that the industry now is actively confronting the problem and that the instances are declining rapidly.

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