Friday, November 5, 2010

Foreclosure Fraud Expanding to Process Servers

The foreclosure fraud apparently didn't begin and end with the robo-signing of Affidavits relating to how much the homeowner owes the bank. Now foreclosure defense attorneys are looking into whether there has been faulty service on clients by robo process servers. A process server is the person who is in charge of giving you the lawsuit. Those people may have filed fraudulent documents with the Court claiming they couldn't find a homeowner facing foreclosure, despite paperwork clearly setting out a homeowner's whereabouts.

The Florida Attorney General's Office has been asking questions about process serving as it investigates alleged sloppy or fraudulent practices by the four law firms handling the vast majority of foreclosures for banks: the law offices of David J. Stern in Plantation, Marshall C. Watson in Fort Lauderdale, Shapiro & Fishman in Boca Raton, and the Florida Default Law Group in Tampa.

Apparently, the law firms use outside process serving companies to deliver the lawsuits, that in turn contract with private independent servers.

Some Florida foreclosure defense attorneys are claiming that property owners never received a court summons even though they still were living in their home, or that servers never took required steps to find them. Some claim the process servers lied and/or filed false court affidavits about to whom or when they delivered the papers. Homeowners involved in foreclosures are required to receive a court summons, delivered in person by a process server. If no one is at the address, servers are required to repeatedly try to make face-to-face contact before getting the court's permission to publish a legal notice instead. I guess the process servers where just as sloppy as everyone else and it was easier to commit fraud than it was to do their job correctly. 


Read the Sun-Sentinel Story here.