Mortgage and real estate scams alive and well

Now that the mortgage and housing markets are together going through tough times scam artists have come out to sniff for opportunity under just about every rock. They are shamelessly preying on the unaware. The numbers alone tell the story, as FBI's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, registered almost 15,000 SARs, or suspicious activity reports, in the first fiscal quarter of 2008 and plans on getting over 60,000 of them for the entire year. Fiscal 2007 had 46,700 and 2006 35,600. That makes for quite an upward curve for the last three years.

And those figures are only part of the story. Banks under federal scrutiny are the only ones required to record SARs while those home loan lenders who fall outside the reporting regimen make up a good majority of the total loan activity. The problem, therefore, is much larger than what these FBI statistics reveal and the current regulatory structure appears to be unable to stop it.

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Photo by sellabode.