Archive for the &;crime-and-punishment&; Category
LA Crime Story: Mortgage Fraud Beats BankRobbers
July 9, 2009
Used to be California/LA led the nation in bank robberies, with 357 in 2006 alone. Perhaps Point Break&;s Presidential bank robbery team (that&;s Patrick Swayze as Bodhi as Ronald Reagan) wasn&;t such a fantasy.
We&;re still up there with these desperate people (A former policeman and Little League coach known as the &;Polite Bank Robber?&; The 180 pound &;Starlet Bandit&; in movie star sunglasses? A father/son bank robbery team, anyone?) but there&;s more people robbin&; with a pen and a calculator these days.
According to the LA Times Peter Hong,
&;The FBI&;s annual mortgage fraud review says L.A. leads in mortgage fraud, measured by reports from the agency&;s field offices.
&;The Los Angeles field office received 9,971 &;suspicious activity reports&; in 2008; second-place Miami had 5,155. The report says fraud schemes include builders offering secret incentives to home buyers, such as falsely inflating a purchase price to make it appear as if a buyer has made a down payment when none was made. If the home forecloses, there is no home equity for the lender to recover.
Other schemes the report identifies are scams in which a group uses a straw buyer to intentionally default on a mortgage, then buys the property at a discount from the lender through a short sale; and foreclosure rescue schemes in which perpetrators offer to help a borrower in foreclosure and surreptitiously take over the deed to the property.&;
We may not have a football team&;but hey, we&;re number one!
Tags:colorful-bank-robbers, Los-Angeles, Los-Angeles-bank-robberies, Los-Angeles-foreclosures, Patrick-Swayze, Point-Break, Point-Break-live Posted in Crime, crime-and-punishment, Los Angeles in the Movies, Los-Angeles | 1 Comment &;
Drew Peterson, ManiacCop
May 22, 2009
&;I guess I should have returned those library books,&; laughed accused double wife murderer Drew Peterson. He nodded at his handcuffs and added, &;How do you like my bling?&;
The humor of a maniac cop.
Tags:Drew-Peterson, Maniac-Cop, Peterson-murderer, tabloid-journalism Posted in crime-and-punishment | Leave a Comment &;