Mortgage Mafia Owns 80% of US Titles
Just as Cede & Co. at one point in every transaction on Wall Street “owns” the stock or bond or anything traded, so, too, the mortgage industry was taken over by similar “digital pirates” who used computer programs to eliminate paper notes or titles- kind of like fiat currency backed up by nothing. The Mortgage Electronic Registration System essentially owns 67 million pieces of property in the US at this moment, or about 80% of all US residential titles. And that explains why the Anonymous Patriots, despite paying off our properties in full, cannot get a title on our properties from the bank who held our mortgages.
For those readers who made it so far, don’t think that you are an exception. Continue to read on:
When the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. was created, it was intended to serve as a nominee for real estate transactions in a way strongly analogous to how Cede & Co. serves as the nominee owner of record (i.e., the “street name” owner) for all securities held in trust by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the American securities industry was drowning in paper because of the sheer complexity of physically exchanging thousands of stock certificates every day. By “immobilizing” physical stock certificates and later replacing them altogether with book entries, DTCC enabled the development of the modern computerized securities industry.
The MERS system eRegistry is a system of record that identifies the owner (Controller) and custodian (Location) for registered eNotes. Built by MERSCORP Holdings, Inc. with the endorsement of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) and launched in 2004. Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac require the registration of eNotes on the MERS system eRegistry before they are eligible for purchase.
As mortgage-backed securities grew in volume during the 1980s, it became self-evident that a similar mechanism was needed for the mortgages placed into those securities. MERS fixed this problem in that most standard loan documents were changed to name MERS as the nominal beneficiary or mortgagee of record. This enabled lenders and investors to transfer mortgages without recording assignments in local recorders’ offices and, in turn, avoided having to pay recording fees.
Ideally, assuming a loan is properly paid back on time, a MERS loan needs only two documents to be recorded:
1) the original mortgage or deed of trust naming Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., and a reconveyance of the mortgage or
2) deed of trust back to the borrower (thus merging legal and equitable title).
If all entities along the way are MERSCORP Holdings, Inc. members, then all intermediate transfers between those points are tracked only on the MERS system, and the entity who holds the loan at the end merely records the reconveyance as an agent for MERSCORP Holdings, Inc. (Notice how MERS is both (1) an agent for the original lender, and then (2) the final lender acts as an agent for MERSCORP Holdings, Inc.; this is why MERS’ critics frequently attack it as “two-faced.”)
Some of the illegal activities of MERS named in the many law suits against it include:
MERS’s officers often issue assignments without verifying the underlying information, which has resulted in incorrect or fraudulent transfers.
Simultaneously claim to be the mortgagee and the nominee/agent of the lender or trustee.
Harmful effect on the integrity and transparency of public recording and tax avoidance.
Its nominal ownership of millions of home loans poses a disastrous risk for mortgage investors should Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. ever declare bankruptcy.
MERS was used by the Wall Street Banks to avoid paying county recorder fees and real estate transfer tax fees.
Using a long list of names who are known “robo-signers.”
MERS is a shell company with no employees, owned by the giant banks.
MERS is a tax and fee-avoiding opportunity.
MERS has all but replaced the nation’s public land ownership records.
MERS placed many undiscovered and no document mortgages in circulation.
The bundling and sale of mortgages and claims of title can make it very difficult to know who owes what to whom.
For the first time in the nation’s history, there is no longer an authoritative, public record of who owns land in each county.
There is an unbelievable scandal in the making that threatens to subvert our four-century-old method for guaranteeing a fundamental building block of the American republic—property ownership.
Created in 1995 by the country’s biggest banks, MERS quietly took control of and privatized mortgage record-keeping across the country and, in the span of a few years, scrambled America’s private property ownership records to the point where no one could figure out who owns what.
MERS was a tool used by America’s top financial institutions to pump up the real estate market.
Mortgage-backed securities, robo-signers, lightning quick foreclosures, subprime mortgages and just about everything else that went into feeding the biggest real estate bubble in U.S. history could not function without help from MERS.
MERS was created to help the industry push its latest money-maker: mortgage-backed securities, a Wall Street financial scam that dressed up the most toxic, guaranteed-to-fail loans as Grade A investment vehicles that could be sold to suckers looking for an easy gain.
The whole purpose of MERS is to allow “servicers” to pretend as if they are someone else: the “owners” of the mortgage, or the real parties in interest.
MERS artifice and enterprise evolved into an “ultra-fictitious” entity, which can also be understood as a “meta-corporation.”
The average consumer, or even legal professional, can never determine who or what was or is ultimately receiving the benefits of any mortgage payments. The conspirators set about to confuse everyone as to who owned what. The use of MERS as a generic placeholder for the real owner of a mortgage was a crucial component of the entire securitization machine. The entire scheme was predicated upon the fraudulent designation of MERS as the ‘beneficiary’ under millions of deeds of trust.
Before MERS, it would not have been possible for mortgages with no market value to be sold at a profit or collateralized and sold as mortgage-backed securities. Before MERS, it would not have been possible for the Defendant banks and AIG to conceal from government regulators the extent of risk of financial losses those entities faced from the predatory origination of residential loans and the fraudulent re-sale and securitization of those otherwise non-marketable loans.
From 1997—the year MERS went online—to 2005, mortgage fraud reports increased by 1,411 percent. MERS saved the banking industry—and cost municipal governments—tens of billions of dollars by allowing lenders to avoid paying county filing fees. MERS extracted at minimum around $30 billion from cash-strapped local governments.
MERS also has almost no paid employees and does not keep any records or minutes of corporate meetings. When pressed to explain the inner workings of the organization, its executives evaded questions, feigned ignorance.
In California, the suit against MERS could cost the company somewhere between $60 to $120 billion in damages and penalties.
Almost every participating major bank in MERS has been charged for mortgage fraud and paid fines in the billions.