Foreclosure robo-signers hired with no mortgage experience

What a bombshell:


NEW YORK — In an effort to rush through thousands of home foreclosures since 2007, financial institutions and their mortgage servicing departments hired hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and people who had worked on assembly lines and installed them in "foreclosure expert" jobs with no formal training, a Florida lawyer says.


In depositions released Tuesday, many of those workers testified that they barely knew what a mortgage was. Some didn't know what a complaint was, or even what was meant by personal property. Most troubling, several said they knew that they were lying when they signed the foreclosure affidavits and that they agreed with defense lawyers' accusations about document fraud.


"The mortgage servicers hired people who would never question authority," said Peter Ticktin, a Deerfield Beach lawyer who is defending 3,000 homeowners in foreclosure cases. Ticktin gathered 150 depositions from bank employees who say they signed foreclosure affidavits without reviewing the documents or ever laying eyes on them — earning them the name "robo-signers."


The deposed employees worked for the mortgage service divisions of banks such as Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, as well as for mortgage servicers like Litton Loan Servicing, a division of Goldman Sachs.


Ticktin said he would make the testimony available to state and federal agencies that are investigating allegations of possible mortgage fraud. "This was an industrywide scheme designed to defraud homeowners," Ticktin said.


In one deposition, a foreclosure supervisor with Litton Loan couldn't define basic terms and testified that she didn't know what the required conditions were for a bank to foreclose or who the holder of the mortgage note was. "I don't know the ins and outs of the loan; I just sign documents," she said at one point.


Until now, only a few depositions from robo-signers have come to light. But the volume of new depositions will make it more difficult for financial institutions to argue that robo-signing was an aberrant practice in a handful of rogue back offices.