The lawyers for the bank in our case had a choice when they discovered, in 2006, that they held a forged mortgage and did not have the paperwork to back up their claims. There were legal recourses for these attorneys’ to take that would have been, at least an attempt at doing things the right way; yet, instead, they made a conscious decision to follow in the predecessors footsteps and commit further frauds against already victimized homeowners.
Many will look at you as you tell them your story and will state, “How exactly did someone signing your name cause you harm?”; “It seems harmless enough. How are you damaged by such a “frivolous” thing?” For many years these questions would send my mind into a tailspin, because, in my mind I’m thinking, “Are you serious?”
This type of mindset is horrible when you think of the implications that are associated with this way of thinking. Pray tell, what is the purpose of a notary? The reason that we have notaries is to attest to both the authenticity of legal documents, as well as identification of the parties signing them. Documents that, when executed under the seal of a notary, are always presumed by the law to be valid, and to have been signed by the people identified within these documents. When these authenticated documents that have been fraudulently executed are submitted as fraud upon the courts to steal land and property from innocent homeowners; that becomes a problem and is extremely damaging.
When that fraudulence leads to further fraud; it becomes even more harmful. These attorneys’ knew when they received notification of the forged mortgage that they were going to be in trouble in the future. They had very little documentation from the original bank; and low and behold, our former attorney, following the protocol of the law, diligently sent them their discovery requests; handing them everything they needed to perpetrate further fraud upon the homeowners. We, the homeowners, whom had already been victimize once by having their names forged and notarized to a document that gave these attorneys’ clients security in our home.
These attorneys’ would send us on a ten year ride through purgatory and through all levels of the federal court system and the state circuit court over a property that when this started was valued at about $90,000. The value of this property now is below $20,000. There would be seven attorneys ganging up on one bankruptcy attorney who was trying to right a wrong; throwing motion upon motion at him in order to frustrate and distract him. I would work in literal servitude to our former attorney for five years to try and defer the costs of this case. Does my time mean nothing? I was a certified tax assessor making approximately $50 an hour; this attorney was making $250 an hour to manage our case. So, therefore, I was never actually gaining ground on the $59,000+ bill.
For years I would go through losing friends because they thought we were fighting for a “free house”, when at the time, all we were saying was that you couldn’t hold our home over our head. In fact, us accepting that we had signed the note (although we had not gotten the privilege to examine their “note”) would haunt us through the entirety of this; with the banks attorneys’ pounding us on our intent, despite the fact that a crime had been committed against us.
These types of crimes are not only damaging to the victimized homeowners. They are damaging to their neighbors, their community and to the foundation of our country. This country is ruled by our land records. They are a very important part of our history and our land records are intended to give notice that there may be multiple interests in the land located within a jurisdiction; be it fee titles, life estates, mortgages, and so on. It also shows who owns all interests in the land in any given jurisdiction.
Now, that I have a good, solid decade of experience on fighting these unethical and criminal “officers of the court”; I have learned that it’s all a bait and switch; fraudulent to its core and possible unsalvageable. When you can have the type of evidence that we have and end up with the outcome that we are now experiencing, you have to determine that the system is truly broke. When lawyers can get away with documented fraud, to the courts and the courts condone it; we, as a country have lost our way.
For a decade we have been made to look like the biggest deadbeats on the planet by these lawyers; however, what they negated to tell you is that we paid $75,000+ into a Chapter 13 plan that, when I lost my job, had to be converted to a Chapter 7. By the time of the discharge in 2004 we owed more on our home than when we originally went into the Chapter 13 in 1997. They also negate to tell you that the $12,000 we paid into the bankruptcy court that was to supposed to be paid on this forged mortgage was given to the bankruptcy trustee’s attorney for the services of jumping on the bandwagon in our mortgage forgery case and then, after we won, doing a backdoor deal with these very attorney’s to buy back the now avoided mortgage for the sum of $30,000 to “benefit the estate.” The only thing that was part of the estate was the mortgage and some back taxes; because for those of you that have been following this blog already know, we had only came out of bankruptcy in January of 2004. How many bills could we possibly wrack up in that time? Seeing we had paid, now, over $87,000 for basically nothing; I would like to know how we were ever deadbeats. I would like to know how many people could survive an $87,000+ hit to their pocketbook; gaining absolutely nothing for those expenditures only to have to continue on for over a decade to fight a wrong that was done to us? We paid into a plan for six years to come out owning more than we owed when we went in; when we were forced to convert to a Chapter 7, losing a paid off car (per the trustee’s report) as well as losing all equity that should have been gained throughout those six years of payments on the previous mortgage.
Instead we end up coming out of a devastating year filled with job loss, war and death, not only of an adult in our family, but a child too, compiled with losing $75,000+ to a bankruptcy plan that would have been paid off in eight months; to get caught up with a highly disreputable company that forged a mortgage document instead of contacting us to come in and do it has been nothing short of a diabolical, gut-wrenching, nightmare. We then were forced to fight like criminals for seven years, through three different levels of the federal court system, to prove to the banks’ attorneys’ (and bankruptcy judge) that they could not be granted an equitable mortgage based on fraud.
During this game of “keep your eye on the shiny object”; these seven attorneys’ would blind our attorney by throwing motion, after motion at him; the whole time blinding him to the fact that they were getting away with not producing discovery requests; and eventually getting the court to say that they didn’t need to produce any more requests. After clearing up that little issue, our documents would begin to show up as these attorneys’ exhibits throughout the rest of the mortgage forgery case.
It would be in April of 2014, after obtaining all of our documents from our former attorney, that we would discover the lengths that these attorneys’ would go through to fraudulently forge, alter and manipulate documents. We would learn that they would have no issues with changing the color of the ink to “blue”, assuming that we had signed our documents in that color; to further entice the court to go their way.
I don’t mind losing a fair fight. I wouldn’t have even fought as long and as hard as I have, if it weren’t for one thing. We have clean hands. We did not lie to the courts. We have committed absolutely no crime. We, back in 2007, didn’t even dispute the note; however, we were never privy to seeing this “note” until 2014 after my retrieval of our case documents.
I feel that I am a very ethical person. I believe that when you are an attorney, judge or government official, you are held to a higher standard. You are mandated, supposedly by law, to be honest in all dealings. Altering documents after notarization is not legal; forging peoples’ names to documents is not legal; forging endorsements are not legal; and fraud on the court is definitely not legal. Yet in our case, they are getting away with it; or at least they think they are.
We, as citizens of this country, should never allow this type of activities to continue in our courts. I thought, way back in 2004, that we were going to move forward with our lives after a tragic year of events. Due to the frauds of these attorneys’ our live has been in a holding pattern that still continues today. I had to give up a career because I mentally could not handle both the tax assessing profession and this fight for my home at the same time. Between the “good old boy” politics and the hell that these attorneys’ put us through, I was nearing collapse and something had to give and my career took the axe.
Now fast forward to eight years later. Our home is crumbling around us; our credit is shot and we may or may not lose our home to a “judicial foreclosure” within the next couple of months. This should not happen to good citizens by entities of “public trust”, or those that represent them. Through this ordeal I have a difficult time trusting anything I ever trusted before all of this happened. My view of our legal system is tarnished beyond repair and my moral and ethical fiber has been shaken to the core.
Long gone are the handshake deals of old, where you could trust your fellow man to be honest and forthright. Gone are the days of getting legal justice, if we sit and do nothing when we have the tools to fight. Gone are the records that gave our land its rich history, because now, after discovering years of fraud throughout the land records system, can we ever again trust that the documents we see are actually true and legal documents. With the onset of technology, even lawyers will partake in the field of crime when it suits their needs.
Mortgage Forgery|The Pain of Fighting a Crime 
Yes.