Michael Olenick: Are Remotely-Processed Mortgage Assignments Another Smoking Gun?

By Michael Olenick, founder and CEO of Legalprise, and creator of FindtheFraud, a crowd sourced foreclosure document review system (still in alpha)

We know from the robo-signing scandal that the signers don’t read what they’re signing, but it is also apparent that they’re scattered almost randomly around the country.

In my 2,500 sample size I studied the county of notarization, which indicates where the primary signers are since the notary attests the documents were signed in front of him or her. This batch of assignments were signed in 35 different states, and 101 different counties. So much for consistency.

The most common county is San Bernardino, CA, which filed 746 mortgage assignments, 29.8% of the total. California overall notarized 815 Florida assignments, 32.6% of the total. Florida, which you’d expect, came next with 610 assignments, or 24.4% of the total, followed by Minnesota (9.3%), Texas (7.3%), Ohio (4.8%), Georgia (4.5%), Louisiana (2.8%), and Nebraska (2.6%). All other states had less than 2%.

Certain counties really stood out from others.

It isn’t clear why San Bernardino, a large portion which consists of the Mojave desert, signed off on almost one in three assignments for Palm Beach County, FL, a tropical oasis on the other side of the country. The overwhelming majority of these assignments involved HSBC or US Bank. Virtually every assignment from San Bernardino had the notarization page entirely separate from the actual assignment, despite more than adequate space for the notarization on the first page, the practice virtually everywhere else. The notary is signing, under penalty of perjury, that the document was signed in front of them and that everything on it is kosher. If I didn’t know better — and, actually, I don’t — it almost looks like the notarization pages and the assignments were being prepared separately then put together after the fact.

After California and San Bernardino comes Florida. Of the 610 assignments inked in a more reasonable state 330, over half, were signed in Broward County. Broward, which adjoins Palm Beach County, seems more reasonable except that the overwhelming majority of these assignments were executed either by the law firms of David J. Stern or Marshall Watson.