Bogus foreclosure claim not isolated

It may be rare that Berta got a judge to overturn a foreclosure sale on his Sarasota homestead by asserting he was never served with foreclosure papers. As you may have read in Monday’s Herald-Tribune, the foreclosure attorney claimed Berta could not be found and therefore his house was abandoned. That despite the fact Berta is a local business owner who was easily findable.

Still, if that were an isolated glitch, I might not be doing a column. But there’s much evidence, as the Florida Bar has confirmed, that some bulk-rate foreclosure firms are seriously cutting corners. And why not?

They can usually file sloppy documents with unverified and false claims and get away with it, because most foreclosures are not contested. Usually, nobody even skims through the documents.

A recent court ruling says judges don’t need to. The checking is up to homeowners.

That has led to filings so ridiculous that I thought anti-foreclosure lawyer April Charney was kidding when she e-mailed a recent find from Lee County. It is a template, a fill-in-the-blanks foreclosure document, that foreclosure-mill lawyers filed in court as a real one, with almost nothing filled in.

Read more here: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20100223/COLUMNIST/2231020/-1/NEWSSITEMAP?p=all&tc=pgall