Archive for the &;Crime&; 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 &;
Another Day, AnotherMassacre
April 4, 2009
Today&;s shooting: Binghamton, New York. 13 dead April 3, 2009
Monday&;s shooting: Santa Clara, CA. 6 dead. March 30, 2009
Sunday&;s shooting: Carthage, NC 8 dead in a nursing home. March 29, 2009
March 10, 2009: Samson, AL 10 dead in two nearby towns.
January 27, 2009: Wilmington, CA 7 dead in one family
December 24, 2008; Covina, CA, 10 dead in &;Santa Claus&; massacre
October 6, 2008; Los Angeles, 6 dead in one family
That&;s seven U.S. mass killings of 6 or more people in six months, not to mention this year&;s international leader, the massacre of 16 in Germany. I may have missed some.
Are people spinning out of control? Is economic despair the trigger for the trigger?
What&;s going on?
Tags:family-killing, family-massacre, mass-murder, shooting-spree Posted in Crime, Economic Crisis | Leave a Comment &;