I was in the mortgage industry for 8 years. I saw it all. I am not proud to tell you that the industry has not learned from it’s mistakes. one might think that with home purchases and new mortgage volume off by 30 percent or more in many markets in the past year, loan fraud would be down as well.

You would be dead Wrong. A benchmark quarterly study released this week by the mortgage industry’s principal compiler of fraud reports, the Mortgage Asset Research Institute, found that the number of cases jumped 42 percent between the second quarter of 2007 and the same period this year.

They ranged from hoked-up income verifications and credit reports to falsified employment records, financial assets illegally “rented” to buyers to beef up their loan applications, inflated appraisals, straw-buyer scams, and a wide variety of hanky-panky schemes among sellers and purchasers aimed at fooling lenders.

The highest numbers of fraud reports in the second quarter came from Florida, California, Maryland, Illinois and Michigan.

Tough market conditions appear to actually increase pressures to commit fraud, says Merle D. Sharick, vice president of the research institute.

According to a recent article by The Washington Post: The Internet is a key facilitator of their activities, Sharick said, with dozens of Web sites hawking fake income and employment verifications, tax filings, credit scores, deposit verifications and other forms of deception. Some individuals have begun using free advertising services such as Craigslist to promote their wares, such as bank deposits that are available to home loan applicants to claim as their own on mortgage applications. In fact, the deposits remain in the control of the scammers; only the account identification is changed for a short time.

Wow! What a sad commentary on a dying industry who is still screaming how unfair it was that they take the brunt of the blame for the present crisis. We originate the loans - Many of the borrowers had no idea what was and continues to be done on their behalf.

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I am working on a post about IRS Tax Liens, but I thought it would be good to go ahead and get some information out to those who have requested it:

IRS Tax Liens & Wage Garnishment

IRS Hitman - A great perspective.

Bankruptcy & Wage Garnishment - A personal insight from a forum

Bankruptcy & Wage Garnishment - Will a BK stop a garnishment?

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If you have received notice that your wages are about to be garnished then you are at the right place.

First of all lets explore the basics:

Wikipedia Definition - the most common type of garnishment, is the process of deducting money from an employee’s monetary compensation (including salary) as a result of a court order. In the United States, such payments are limited by federal law to 25 percent of the disposable income that the employee earns. Garnishments can be taken for any type of debt but common examples of debt that result in garnishments include:

• child support
• taxes
• unpaid court fines
• defaulted student loans
• any other type of monetary judgment

More To Come…

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