One for the little guy

You may have heard of the mortgage fraud cases that have been around for the past few years. Basically, the bad guys produce fake documents that they've just purchased a house and go to the bank with a mortgage application. The bank approves it and hands over a few hundred thousand dollars to the fraudsters who take the money and run.

Then the real owners of the house suddenly find out that there's a mortgage on their house and they're liable.

So far, the law has forced the home owner to pay up. However, a recent court case has the judge siding with the home owners and making the bank and the mortgage broker liable.

In this case, the bank agreed that the couple had been frauded, but that the bank had also been frauded, so the couple who own the home are legally responsible for the mortgatge.

So, just to clarify, the homeowners had no part in the actual fraud other than the unfortunate fact that it was their home. The bank and the mortgage broker are really the ones that were duped and didn't do their due diligence to ensure there was actually a legal transaction in the transfer of the house, and yet the bank, a multi-billion dollar company, thinks that a couple (with two kids) should now come up with $300,000 to pay for the banks error. Talk about drawing the wrong card in Monopoly.

This case is going to appeals court and I hope that the decision is upheld. Even if it is, I'm sure the couple have had to pay for a rather large legal bill. I hope that they now take the bank to court in a civil suit to get that money back and a little extra for the time they've wasted on this.

Not that I'm in favour of all the civil cases going on today with people suing for spilling a hot cup of coffee on them, but in this case I think it's justified. (Isn't hot cup of coffee kind of an oxymoron. Or maybe it's just the person doing the suing who's the moron.)

It's stupidity like this, dealing with big companies who have so much money and the law on their side, that really gets my blood boiling. (And don't get me on about P&C insurance companies.) What options do we as individuals have? Not that I would in anyway ever condone someone going postal, but these are the situations where it doesn't take a crazy person to be pushed to such measures.