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It always makes me cringe when I hear people scamming on other peoples misfortune. Some make me cringe more than others. As an example if you feel the need to send your money overseas to someone you never heard of and they promise to pay you back (and guess what, they don't), I don't feel too sorry for you. But when a person in need turns to someone for help and they instead get scammed and end up in a worse predicament, it makes my blood boil.
Even though the housing and credit markets are down doesn't mean that real estate fraud is going away; instead, it's just changing. Foreclosure fraud is the new trend nationally, and the Utah Attorney General's Office is expecting to see it much more here in the coming year.
This information is from a special report by Andrew Adams of KSL-TV.
"It makes me sick that somebody would do that at the worst time for someone," says Chief Deputy Attorney General Kirk Torgensen. "The worst time really in anyone's life is at that point when you think you may be losing your home, (and) you're not sure how you're going to survive. There is something really despicable about that."
The schemes vary widely, but often they involve a person or company offering to help make payments on a troubled loan if the title of the home is deeded over them.
"If somebody's asking you to do that - while there may be legitimate reasons - it ought to be a huge red flag to people to say, ‘I've got to slow down. I've got to check this out,'" Torgensen says.
The advice from law enforcement and prosecutors is, in short, to simply take great care.
"If you get an ad or someone approaches you with a deal, do your due diligence," Torgensen says. "Check the person or company out."
Torgensen says if the deal is difficult to understand, present it to somebody who will understand it. He also recommends checking with the Department of Commerce to see if a company is legitimately licensed and with the Better Business Bureau for complaints.
The growth in foreclosure fraud comes after the unbridled expansion of mortgage fraud through the middle of the decade. In FBI numbers reported by MSNBC last fall, suspicious activity reports filed by banks grew from 6,900 in 2003 to 46,700 in 2007.
It's a time period that also saw significant growth in mortgage fraud in Utah. A mortgage fraud law was added to state books last year, and attorneys are now prosecuting cases under that law now, instead of one related to communications fraud.
"The mortgage fraud in general, and the magnitude of the fraud that we've seen that led up this crisis, was staggering," Torgensen says. "To me, it was greed at a level that was unbelievable, and it was greed every step of the way."
Now, as criminals change their schemes, Torgensen isn't surprised.
"They look for opportunities," Torgensen says. "And wherever there really is an opportunity where people are stressed out, people are at their wits' end, that's where criminals thrive."
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