If you are considering perpetrating a white-collar crime, you might want to stick to wire or mail fraud and steer clear of mortgage fraud- the FBI is shifting its priorities:
June 12 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, confronting a surge in mortgage fraud, has ordered more than two dozen of its field offices to stop probing some financial crimes so agents can focus on the subprime crisis.
Kenneth Kaiser, chief of the bureau’s criminal investigative division, issued the directive late last week on a video conference call with the heads of 26 offices in areas where mortgage crime is rampant, said Bill Carter, an FBI spokesman in Washington.
Carter said the shift was made after an analysis of how agents are spending their time. The FBI traditionally has moved investigators to address urgent needs, he said. About 150 agents were working on more than 1,300 mortgage cases before the change.
The problem is, there aren’t enough agents to go around:
“It comes as no surprise that law enforcement is spread too thin to cover all the bases,” Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat and member of the Judiciary Committee, which oversees the FBI, said in an e-mailed statement. “Over the past several years, the administration has reassigned as many as 2,400 FBI agents from fighting crime to combating terrorism without replacing them.”
The 26 field offices were told to temporarily suspend opening new cases dealing with price fixing, mass marketing, wire fraud, mail fraud and environmental crimes, Carter said. Current cases aren’t being dropped, he said. The FBI has 56 field offices and about 12,000 agents.
Carter said the bureau is “not walking away” from pending investigations. “We’re just saying, `Don’t open any new cases,”’ he said.
The affected FBI offices are in states including Florida, Georgia, California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, New York, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Minnesota, he said. All are considered mortgage fraud “hot spots,” he said.
Even at that, the FBI isn’t going to make a dent in wide world of mortgage fraud:
Last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, the FBI received almost 47,000 so-called Suspicious Activity Reports detailing potential mortgage crimes, a 31 percent jump over the previous year. In the first half of 2008, there already have been 38,000 reports.
OK, maybe your odds of not being caught perpetrating mortgage fraud are still pretty decent after all.
Whew. I’m glad I’m just a bank robber. Given the climate in finacial services today, turn-about is fair play, right?
Keith-
The level of mortgage fraud pretty much indicates that ripping off banks has become the national pastime.
Sad, isn’t it? Your average bank robber won’t ever walk away with as much as some of these fraudsters have- and mortgage fraud isn’t near as risky.
As I posted some months ago all we need are a few high profile prosecutions of borrowers who lied on their applications. Essentially a back door shakedown with the threat of criminal prosecution. “Thinking about walking away from your mortgage?” “Did you lie on your application?” Walk away and go to jail.
Looking for crooks in all the wrong places!
The Government should be on trial along with their accomplices in the Fed. When housing was the only thing holding up our economy and the President could brag about increased homeownership, there were no crooks, America was on a roll.
The Fed dropped the interest rate to 1% in June 2003 and government lending fed the housing industry Miracle Grow to drag us out of a recession, depending on inflated wages to work their magic. But wages didn’t inflate, only prices. Uh-oh.
Now the crooks are investigating the crooks. After all it certainly couldn’t be the fault of the finest government that money can buy.
mtnmike,
How true it is. It’s amazing how short the memory becomes when looking for a scapegoat. If anybody should be going to jail it should be Greenspan and his cronies. Nobody forced the banks to do anything. What a joke.
freemonster,
I agree, but there’s a few high-profile people that committed huge amounts of mortgage fraud, even admitting to doing it (Casey Serin, anyone?). Take your victories where you can, I suppose..
Twist-
If mortage fraud is indeed the new national pastime, it’s about time for the 7th inning stretch.
Someone get me some peanuts.
Why does it have to be one or the other?
To the extent Greenspan, Bush and their cronies have committed crimes, prosecute them and send them off to jail. If no crime against the laws of the U.S. was committed, but great crimes against humanity were, that’s what lynchings are for, and good luck with that, but don’t hold your breath.
If you lied on your mortgage app and fleeced a bank for hundreds of thousands of dollars so you could play housing roulette, and now won’t repay, then you, too, rightfully get to go to jail. There’s more than enough blame, lying, and criminality to go around.
Nice post mountain Mike. It’s pretty sad they’ve had to put the FBI on it, where I live we’ve had a string of murders and solving those crimes which is what the FBI is good at is just not happening. Taking apart the mortgage industry and prosecuting some of the players should not be all that difficult, the paper trail is right their in front of them. They’ve already been hoodwinked, for the most part with terrorism, and now mortgage fraud, the FBI is more or less, simply chasing their own tails.
All the Banks had to do was just say “no” and use the old, true and tried standard underwriting practices and America would not have been fleeced of their equities. Bankers slinging loans like dealers sling crack, what do you expect from our society? Bush, et al, ordered the OCC in 2003 to hamper the 50 States to leave the bankers alone from challenging the Banks’ part of the whole deception. When your kids are dying in IRAN and SYRIA – next – just sleep well at night knowing that the 5 wealthiest banks (families) in the last 100 years, are getting richer gobbling up the 100’s of failed banks and failed companies, the FED will finally have absolute power to print up more worthless dollars for us to buy $10.00 milk, and our National debt can be walked away from as a tool to screw over the Chinese and Saudi’s, unless they can own the deeds on a few million U.S. houses… Who do you love? Certainly not ourselves! God Bless us all – pass the grass soup, please! Oh, make sure to vote for the bought and paid for party, (either one will suffice.)
Rob,
No need for any of our deaths in Iran and Syria. We have all the oil we need. The U.S. needs to default on our debt. Screw em all. That would crash the Middle East. China would crash. We wouldn’t even have to fire a single round. Break up the U.S. banking cartel. Break up the Insurance cartel. Break up the lawyer cartel. zzzzzzzz. Wow, I just had the weirdest dream.
(Crossing fingers) Please let it be Casey, please let it be Casey.