It was almost 200 years ago that Texas soldiers first cried out in battle “Remember the Alamo!” However, right now Guilford County Register of Deeds Jeff Thigpen is making a similar cry in a more recent war – one between his Register of Deeds office and some of the largest financial institutions in the world.
Thigpen has just started, along with several other initiatives, a series of national webinars, web-based seminars, that attempts to unite deeds officials, mortgage attorneys and others around the country in an effort to prevent continued mortgage fraud by large financial institutions. The web conferences are also meant to help clean up the mess left in the wake of years of massive mortgage fraud.
In addition, Guilford County is expected to take legal action against some of the same responsible giant financial institutions soon, and that action could have national implications. However, right now the details of the expected legal action are not being revealed by county officials.
The webinars, along with the potential lawsuit and Thigpen’s other efforts, could also help establish new legislation that would hinder similar abuses in the future.
Over the last two years, Thigpen has become a national figure in calling attention to document forgery by major banks, robo-signing, and other types of mortgage fraud – and his new internet initiative is an attempt to organize registers of deeds and other deeds officials across the country, as well as an attempt to use the courts, state attorney generals offices, and other means to address the widespread wrongdoing by major banks.
The article then goes on to talk about a conference put on by the Property Records Industry Association (PRIA), which is a group composed of registers, county clerks, members of the American Land Title Association, mortgage bankers and similar groups and individuals with an interest in deeds registration and mortgage banking issues.
The panel addressed topics such as robo-signing and mortgage fraud and Thigpen was up against Bill Beckmann, who was previously CEO of CitiMortgage, and is now the CEO of the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS).
MERS is a company that was used by most major banks to create falsified mortgage documents with fake signatures in order to quickly process those documents for purposes of bundling mortgages, expediting foreclosures and other actions. (Often, when Thigpen speaks of MERS, he throws in the word “evil.”)
It was at that San Antonio conference that Thigpen and Beckmann went head to head.
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