Fwd: Can your pirates jump up our anti-foreclosure efforts?

[James O'Keefe]

Grace Ross, former Mass. gubernatorial candidate, has been working on the foreclosure crisis for a few years now.  It is a pretty big issue still, what with the banks seemingly having government permission to foreclose on people with forged paperwork and the like.

She has pretty big data mining and home owner outreach needs, but if she and her team can pull it off, it could help a lot of people keep their homes.

If anyone has the time and skills to help with this effort, she outlines what she needs below.  Please drop her an email if you can help or suggest any people who could help.

Thanks!

Jamie

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Grace Ross <gr...@geeseinflight.com>

Hi Jamie,

I wanted to follow up on your interest, though, in helping with what I think could be the breakthrough in the foreclosure struggle. We do have this fabulous datamining organization which I think can take care of the pieces they’re responsible for. 

Still, there’s still tons of pieces of work that doing. Here are a few initial ideas.

One is breaking MERS open.

The Mortgage Electronic Registration System, I assume you know, is the system the banks set up. They and their foreclosure mill law firms are generally members of MERS. The purpose of MERS was to do all the assigning of mortgages and avoid the registries of deeds.

We don’t understand how Massachusetts courts could consider MERS systems to meet our legal requirements, but stepping aside from that, simply holding them to their own contractual arrangements with their members we believe may be sufficient to unravel what they’ve done. This is especially likely in cases with what’s referred to as private label securities, the bundled mortgage trusts which are enabled by NY state law.

One key thing is MERS is only allowed to transfer interest in mortgages on behalf of member financial institutions. We don’t know how often they update their members lists and how they update their member lists, but we need somebody who’s really good at “look back” sort of finding caches of documents to pull all of the MERS membership lists back to 2000 ideally. If they’re updated in real time obviously it’s going to be a lot more completed to do, but if we could get anything in that format that would help us identify who was a member when we could potentially identify that MERS was trying to transfer mortgages and even notes which were surely not allowed to do at all for organizations that were not member organizations of MERS. That task that is incredibly helpful.

Another task is an OCR task: key factors in Pooling and Servicing agreements

This might be something I’d ask our big data mining firm to do, but it’s an awful lot of trial and error that needs to be done first to figure out how the data that we need in pooling and servicing agreements (which underlie all these trusts) is included. That way, we can put our hands on it properly. So it would take a lot of explanation to somebody of what the information is we’re looking for; they would have to know how to use search OCR capacity to figure out what’s in the pooling and servicing agreements. I’d have to work with them to make sure we can identify exactly what we need. Those pooling and servicing agreements run almost 300 pages each and so they’re prohibitive for most folks to look for information in. There are, I don’t know, 20,000 of these trusts (I’m guesstimating). There are a limited number of boilerplates of these in existence. I’m not sure how we automate a system that would do this, but if there was a way of looking at mortgage assignment indentifying the proper words in it to look up the pooling and servicing agreement. Then we had a tool to look through the pooling and servicing agreement for what we needed.

That’s the second element that goes with the list of MERS members because MERS is trying to transfer things into trusts and we think that all the institutions in the chain of transfer necessary to transfer something into a trust are not member financial organizations of MERS. Those are two things.

Other projects to enable organizing for folks to sue to get their homes back!

I have this CiviCRM database that we hooked MAAPL’s foreclosure stuff into that. People are supposed to sign up for our legal section and that’s supposed to end up in a database. I’m not sure what’s happening with that.

However, one of the things that’s going to come out of the datamining is going to be thousands of folks who have particular legal violations in their foreclosures. We want to be able to take the information that I’m hoping my datamining group is going to come up with which will get us all the contact information for these folks.

There’s going to be a couple of additional steps that if we could have prepped to do would be really important. What would be ideal to automate. Here’s the ideal.

We take all the property addresses. We have a program to map them on a map so that we can figure out where we need to reach to set up area workshops. We should have a way of reaching those folks. It’s possible that in Hugh’s system is all of the tools we would need to do email blasts and letters and text blasts. I think they’re all there. Additionally ideally we would identify people’s contact info like Facebook account as well to reach them that way.

I would like to have – and it might be someone interfacing with the CiviCRM system – so that we know how to use it better or automate what we’re doing. Maybe somebody needs to train me and my assistant how to do that. Or maybe someone takes it on as an ongoing task.

I would like to be able to essentially write the text for text blasts and then just have an automated way to sort the list and blast out to the folks that we need them to blast them out to. If we can sort the database by regional area, we’d then be able to do updates by region of the state. That would then be attached to the organizing. This task I suspect is most of the way there. Somebody who knows more than me needs to complete it and simplify it and make it available to help in an ongoing way.

Another task is that I have created all these legal document. I need to go through and recreate and update all of this at this point is pretty much out of date. These template are very useful even though they are imperfect right now.

Those templates should be automated templates. When someone signs up, people could put in all of their information that would be entered into a database/spreadsheet; some of this will come from the datamining work which led to our identifying these people. Ideally we could grab from these spreadsheets all of the data from their case and automatically populate my templates with it.

We’d have to figure out what format the information in the database needs to be in. We need someone(s) to write the program that populates these templates for people. This will be important for populating from massive data from the datamining effort for coordinated criminal or class-action style lawsuits, but it would also be good for people who were doing it pro se themselves to be able to populate their form and then have the form print out with the completed information. In addtion, they’re going to need to review it and have a lawyer review it, but a much more automated way will increase our ability to control the quality of the pro se forms that are being created.

We use a much smaller bite size piece of programming work by taking a particular form that we know we’re going to want data to be able to populate out from and actually have folks create how the OCR capacity to read those types of forms. I could give 10 or 20 different versions to somebody. A lot of these forms are standard so there’s like four or five different versions of them and that is all that needs review. They could actually create the programs for those things.

Talk to you soon. Maybe we need to meet – I could take you through each of these,

Thanks,

Grace

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

Hello Grace,

What's your timeline on this?  Also, the linked email seems to presuppose some knowledge we may not all have on this list - do you mind taking a moment to give the background on this project?

best

Shauna

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "open_gov_boston" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to open_gov_bost...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

So what data do you currently have, and what data do you need?  It sounds like you need the MERS membership lists - how do you hope to access that?  What are the potential routes?

Thanks for taking the time to talk through this with me.

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 12:15 AM, <gr...@geeseinflight.com> wrote:

Thanks, Shauna,

So we are approaching getting enough enforcement thru the courts to unravel the entire foreclosure scam (at least the part playing out in MA). It will take reaching 10,000 foreclosed or underwater & massively overpaying but to do this we need access to key pieces of info.

There are about four massive mortgaging/securitizing/foreclosing schemes that almost 100% of what the megabanks did and are continuing to do.

To 1 of them, MERS was/is pivotal.

MERS was the financial industries' privatized version of the traditional registries of deeds - an electronic black box which only the banks and their lawyers are privy to. HOWEVER, to manage to pass muster in the courts for as long as it has, it has had its own internal laws. Its claim to scrupulously following those corporate guidelines has allowed courts to accept cursory "evidence" and allow the banks to keep using MERS to avoid all sorts of legal requirements.

One of their internal corporate claims is that they can legally represent millions of legal transactions because THEY ONLY DO IT FOR THEIR MEMBERS.

We believe that for as many as one quarter of mortgages, MERS acted on behalf of non-members and thereby rendered legal powers claimed but supposed present bank/mortgage-holders invalid.

There are very expensive memberships paid by a limited number of forensic analysts on our side of this struggle that may have access to what financial institutions had MERS membership when but for the thousands we want to have be able to invalidate their present supposed bank's claim to their mortgage - access to these forensic analysts is difficult and expensive.

If instead we had the membership lists for each of MERS time periods (we don't even know how often they update or if its at regular intervals), then we could create a sort of library for homeowners and former homeowners to check in their legal battles.

OR if there is some way for everyone to access their system....

Thing is you need to be able to check based on when the various banks who claimed to have your loan at various times - whether those particular players in the financial/securitization industry actually were MERS members at those times.

If not, then there was an illegal MERS transfer & the present bank claiming your loan can't. And well, if we could invalidate a large portion of 1 quarter of the mortgage market and prove the banks cannot demand payments on those loans...

Well, you see where we are headed?

If we can figure this one, I have a few more like this...

If we are right on just this one violation it could affect a significant portion of about $7 trillion in assets nationmwide these megabanks are claiming to own... We want the homeowners in control of their mortgage & home...

Love, Grace

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

---

From: Shauna Gordon-McKeon <shau...@gmail.com>

Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 23:53:29 -0400

To: <open_go...@googlegroups.com>; <gr...@geeseinflight.com>

Subject: Re: Can your pirates jump up our anti-foreclosure efforts?

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

Has it been legally established that the banks/MERSCORP has a right to keep all this information private?  I'm not sure how we can help get access to the information from a technical perspective.  You mentioned in your first email that the courts are getting close to enforcing?

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 9:50 AM, <gr...@geeseinflight.com> wrote:

This is all I had found & sent jamie:
I found a member url - although we need it going back through time till 2002 if possible - at least 2004.
https://www.mersonline.org/mers/mbrsearch/validatembrsearch.jsp


Thanks!

- Grace

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

---

From: Shauna Gordon-McKeon <shau...@gmail.com>

Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 09:44:21 -0400

To: <gr...@geeseinflight.com>

Cc: <open_go...@googlegroups.com>

[Tom Morris]

Pirates?

[James O'Keefe]

I am captain of the Mass. Pirate Party, I forgot to change the subject when forwarding.

Jamie

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 9:56 AM, Tom Morris <tfmo...@gmail.com> wrote:

Pirates?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "open_gov_boston" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to open_gov_bost...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--
peace,

Jamie
--
Jamie O'Keefe
w: http://www.jamesokeefe.org
e: jok...@jamesokeefe.org
m: 617-447-0210