The article is too long to post here; but the gist of it is that many consumers are being defrauded & the villains are sham llcs.
Some of the people they interviewed for the article signed up for what they thought was a refinance to get them out of the financial hole they were in- what they actually signed was a deed for nominal consideration to an LLC & naturally enough, their o/s mortgage obligations were never taken care of leading to complete financial ruin. I do feel terrible for those people - most of them were elderly & unaware of how the entire process worked & just how much equity they were sitting on. The younger people, though, would have benefited from some caution and attorney representation, What I found interesting though was the number of forged signatures on deeds. One woman had moved out of her brownstone & then discovered that her name had been forged to a deed to an LLC
The LLCs, though, are the real problem according to the article- because there's no way to find the true owners to bring a suit against them. It's all a shell game. Apparently the state of NY is now starting to require that LLCs register the real owners - for tax purposes; but it seems that it's just a drop in the bucket.
My question about the whole thing is what happens after someone discovers a sham conveyance. What kind of recourse would there be. Some of the comments in the article blamed the Registry system as antiquated & unable to reach property owners so as to let them know a conveyance had been made- but I am pretty sure that is beyond the scope of what the Registry does anyway.
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