The Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut are charging three former Nomura Securities Internationalresidential mortgage-backed securities traders with fraud, accusing the trio of “repeatedly lying” to customers about the pricing information of mortgage bonds and defrauding customers of millions of dollars.

The SEC alleges that while employed as RMBS traders at Nomura, Ross Shapiro, Michael Gramins, and Tyler Peters misrepresented the bids and offers being provided to Nomura for RMBSs, as well as the prices at which Nomura bought and sold the securitizations and the spreads the firm earned intermediating RMBS trades.

According to the SEC, Shapiro, Gramins and Peters also trained, coached, and directed junior traders at the firm to engage in the same misconduct.

The SEC stated that the actions of Shapiro, Gramins and Peters helped to “illicitly generate” millions of dollars in additional revenue for Nomura.

In a…

A federal judge in Florida has dismissed two class action lawsuits against non-bank mortgage servicerOcwen Financial, according to court filings.

U.S. District Judge William Dimitrouleas in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, dismissed lawsuits filed by Ocwen Financial shareholders andAltisource Portfolio Solutions shareholders accusing the Atlanta-based servicer of fraud.

“We are pleased that the Court has dismissed these two separate actions against the Company,” Ocwen spokesman Jon Lovallo said in an email to DS News. “We agree with the Court’s rulings, and will continue to vigorously defend ourselves as necessary.”

Read on.

Hat Tip to Patrick Giunta, Esq.

Stumbled across this 5 year old article that supports the view that servicers are the real parties in interest who are protecting only their own interests at the expense of investor and borrower alike. The facts are undeniable. If the loans were modified or worked out, the investors would have done much better than the self inflicted crash imposed by banks posing as servicers on loans for trusts that exist only on paper and not in real life.

The fact remains that if the servicers were eliminated and a new venue was created to intermediate between borrowers and investors, the investors, the borrowers and the taxpayers would all be better off. Only the banks would ,lose out on prospective illegal gains that they have been faking for a decade. The government should have provided this venue. The crash would not have occurred and the…

Interesting in Robert Kiyosaki’s book, Rich Dad’s Prophecy, he predicted  in 2002 that the biggest stock market crash in U.S. history would happen sometime around 2016.

A small bit of bad economic news from China sparked a big global reaction as U.S. stocks followed the rest of the world’s markets down sharply Tuesday, a sign of investors’ deepening concerns about the strength of the Chinese economy.

The blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average dropped nearly 3%, falling 469.68 points, to 16,058.35, while the broad-based Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 58.33, also about 3%, to 1,913.85.

The latest sell-off comes after stocks rebounded last week with the biggest two-day rally in seven years and continues the wild volatility that has marked trading sessions for more than two weeks. Despite the two-day gain, Dow has lost nearly 2,500 points over nine other days.

Read on.

Five years ago this month, GMAC became the first mortgage servicer to announce that they would suspend foreclosure operations, due to irregularities in their document preparation. Within a few weeks every major mortgage servicer in America followed suit. This is usually called the robo-signing scandal, but to be more precise we gave it the name foreclosure fraud. It ended with the five leading servicers, including GMAC, signing the $25 billion National Mortgage Settlement.

Except it didn’t end, and this past week I was handed inconvertible proof of that fact. The scenario is so fantastical that if I didn’t have a working knowledge of foreclosure fraud I wouldn’t have believed it. But it appears to be very real.

Bill Paatalo is a former cop who worked in the mortgage industry as a loan officer and, from 2002-2008, the President of Wissota Mortgage in the Midwest. Since 2009, after experiencing his own…