An expose of bad businesses and their unethical practices

It appears that the ease of getting a mortgage in recent years has also made it easy for scam artists to defraud mortgage lenders. Prosecutors in Atlanta have uncovered a ring that defrauded Bear-Stearns out of millions of dollars. In most cases, the “borrowers” simply lied about their salaries and assets.

There were several cases that made up the overall scheme. One of these is detailed in the article: “Wright was a phone technician earning only $105,000 a year, with assets of only $35,000, and his wife was a homemaker. The palm-tree-lined mansion they purchased with Bear Stearns's $1.8 million recently sold out of foreclosure for just $1.1 million.” Bear Stearns, meanwhile, posted the first quarterly loss in its 84-year history as it wrote down $1.9 billion of mortgage assets Thursday.

Investigators are beginning to think that fraud may have played a larger part than originally thought in the overall mortgage and foreclosure. The Treasury Department is now estimating that fraud contributed to as much as $4.5 billion to the overall mortgage crisis. That amounts to really Bad Business on a gargantuan scale.