Long before the furor over foreclosures exploded nationwide, Gerta Kachko figured something was amiss.
The computer programmer from New Jersey lost her job in 2008, nearly three years after she had taken out a $350,400 mortgage on a second home, a waterfront condominium in Hollywood.
When Kachko missed several months of payments, Deutsche Bank filed for foreclosure, but she didn’t understand why Deutsche was involved. The lender that gave her the note was American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc.
“We never heard of them before,” said Kachko’s son, Eugene, 33.
With that, the Kachkos launched a legal battle to fight the foreclosure, an odyssey that would include a quick judgment for the bank and alleged wrongdoing by so-called robo-signers.
After employees of mortgage-servicing companies nationwide admitted to signing thousands of foreclosure affidavits without reviewing them, several big lenders this fall suspended foreclosures while they investigated possible paperwork errors in the filing process.
Homeowners and their lawyers say overwhelmed lenders and judges are rubber-stamping foreclosures, overlooking major problems and compromising the defendants’ rights to due process.
So…
Eugene Kachko hired an expert on mortgages and foreclosures to review his mother’s case.
The expert, West Palm Beach attorney Lynn Szymoniak, wrote in an affidavit that “it is clear” that Deutsche had not acquired the Kachko mortgage at the time it moved to foreclose.
Szymoniak testified that Deutsche filed a document proving that it owned the Kachko mortgage only after filing the initial foreclosure, and it attempted to make the document effective retroactively.
The document was signed by Linda Green and Linda Thoresen, who were identified as representatives of America Home Mortgage.
But Szymoniak said Green and Thoresen actually were employees of Lender Processing Services Inc., a Jacksonville-based company whose services include drafting missing documents to facilitate foreclosures.
Green and Thoresen “signed thousands of documents each week as needed in foreclosure cases, without any personal knowledge of the documents, often without any authority from the entities they claimed to be their employers and, in most cases, without ever reading such documents,” Szymoniak wrote.
She also noted that LPS told federal regulators in August that its document production operations were the subject of state and federal investigations. A spokewoman for LPS did not respond to an interview request.
On Aug. 20, Sherman filed a motion for a rehearing, asking that the judge’s ruling for Deutsche be vacated on the grounds that the bank allegedly committed fraud.
Judge Eli Breger granted the order on Sept. 24, canceling the Kachko foreclosure. Four days earlier, GMAC Mortgage had become the first lender to suspend foreclosures.
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