Ilyce Glink's Blog
Welcome to Ilyce Glink's blog! Here you'll find Ilyce's latest insights on personal finance advice, real estate advice and consumer issues. Come back often for timely and interesting posts on a wide variety of topics.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
How Can You Protect Yourself from Mortgage Fraud?
The FBI recently released tips on how to protect yourself from mortgage fraud:
- Get referrals and check licenses for mortgage and real estate professionals. FBI says most of them are honest, but it pays to check.
- Don't just rely on your real estate agent for home prices in your area. Do your own research into what homes have recently sold for and what tax assessments have been.
- Watch out for "no money down" loans. FBI says these are gimmicks used to put people into homes they cannot afford.
- Don't let anyone talk you into lying on your mortgage loan application. Many cases of fraud came from real estate agents or mortgage brokers encouraging borrowers to overstate their incomes or to lie about the sources of their down payments.
- Never sign a document with blank lines. If you're unsure have an attorney look at it for you.
FBI also warns you to watch out for scams if you're facing foreclosure. Never sign your home over to someone else - even if they promise it's only "temporary." In many cases the scammers have sold the home out from under the homeowner.
Check out also these stories on mortgage fraud:
http://www.thinkglink.com/Mortgage_Fraud_080414.html
http://www.thinkglink.com/Top_States_for_Mortgage_Fraud_080626.html
http://www.thinkglink.com/Mortgage_Fraud_798.html
And on foreclosure:
http://www.thinkglink.com/Prevent_Foreclosure_791.htm
http://www.thinkglink.com/Stop_Foreclosure_790.htm
http://www.thinkglink.com/Deed_in_lieu_Of_Foreclosure_Will_Hurt_Credit_Rating.htm
Labels: FBI, Foreclosure, Mortgage, mortgage fraud
posted by Melanie G. Rogers at 9:05 AM
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Sunday, June 22, 2008
Ilyce Glink Show, Sunday, June 22, 2008
Today on the Ilyce Glink show, we'll be talking about Operation Malicious Mortgage, the FBI's huge national takedown of mortgage fraud schemes. We'll also be talking about how the FHA is going to renew attempts to get rid of third-party downpayment programs, like Nehemiah, and why that's so important.
I hope you can join us. Labels: FBI, Mortgage, Nehemiah, WSB
posted by Ilyce Glink at 10:03 AM
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Friday, May 23, 2008
How Much Mortgage Fraud?
The FBI released its annual report on the state of financial crimes in the U.S. last night. As you might expect, it's not a pretty picture.
According to the general overview, there has been a spike in the number of housing crimes involving subprime housing market. That in and of itself isn't a huge surprise. If you can't afford to buy a home with a traditional lender, you used to be able to go to the subprime market, where the loan officer wouldn't ask you any questions and you agreed to pay insanely high interest rates and fees all in the name of achieving the American Dream of homeownership. If that sounds a little cynical, I'm sorry. But we've been railing for years about how little sense it makes to give a $500,000 loan to someone who earns $50,000 a year. That doesn't make sense no matter HOW many times you crunch the numbers. But I digress. According to the FBI, the total amount of subprime loans outstanding is $1.3 trillion. The total amount of mortgages outstanding is $4.5 trillion. So despite what you hear about how small a part of the picture subprime mortgage defaults are, this number bring is home: Roughly one-sixth of all mortgage loans are subprime loans. That doesn't mean that they're all going to go under. But as subprime lenders have had to buy back these loans (or take back the properties), they were hoping housing values would continue to go up. Instead, housing values are collapsing (see next post). The FBI contends that mortgage fraud is a huge part of these subprime loans, so the fallout will continue. Folks, it isn't just about loan resets. This problem goes deeper and will take longer to unravel. I'll be talking about this as I fill in for Clark Howard today, 1p to 4p on Newstalk 750 WSB. Listen live at WSBradio.com. Labels: Clark Howard, FBI, mortgage fraud, Subprime
posted by Ilyce Glink at 10:12 AM
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Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Phishing Scam Reaches from Romania to Los Angeles
Latest word from the FBI: Never click on a link in an email that looks like it's from your bank or another financial institution -- unless you know for sure it's real.
Yesterday, the FBI announced it had broken up a couple of high-level phishing rings stretching from Romania to Los Angeles. Before it got shut down, the ring swindled thousands of consumers and banks out of millions of dollars.
According to the FBI's website, here's how it worked:
1. Fraudsters working primarily out of Romania (known as the "suppliers") went phishing and obtained thousands of credit and debit card accounts and related personal information by sending out masses of spam.
2. These suppliers then sent their ill-gotten financial data to their partners in the U.S. (the so-called "cashiers") through Internet chat and e-mail messages.
3. By using some sophisticated but readily available software and technologies, the cashiers manufactured their own credit, debit, and gift cards encoded with the stolen information, giving them unfettered access to large amounts of money via ATMs and point-of-sale terminals.
4. Before these cards were used, cashiers directed "runners" to test the cards by checking balances or withdrawing small amounts of money from ATMs. Then, these "cashable" cards were used on the most lucrative accounts.
5. To bring the scheme full circle, the cashiers wired a percentage of the illegal proceeds back to the suppliers.
Phishing costs consumers and businesses hundreds of millions of dollars every year. The sophistication of these con artists means it's virtually impossible to know if the Bank of America email you just received is real or not. (EBay has trouble telling its true emails from phishing emails and they have thousands of people working in their anti-fraud unit.)
Since you can't know if an email or text message is real, don't respond to it. Instead, go to your browser and type in the address for your bank or financial institution. That way you'll know the contact is real.
Also, and I can't stress this strongly enough, get some hardcore virus protection on your hard drive. Make sure you run the updates every day. That's the only way to protect yourself -- unless you disconnect from the Internet. Labels: FBI, Phishing, Scams
posted by Ilyce Glink at 4:59 PM
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