ING Bank suing under RICO statutes to recover losses by alleged local real estate fraud ring.

Here is the article from the Seattle Times.

Excerpt:

In one deal, the bank loaned a borrower $935,000 to buy a Tacoma house for $1.35 million — a house that, according to the real-estate Web site Zillow, is valued higher than 99 percent of homes in its ZIP code. Nationwide Home Lending was paid nearly $30,000 in fees on that loan.

I’ve just dropped an entire commentary I wrote within this post regarding the fantasy idea some people believe that our local area is somewhat insulated from the garbage and degenerates destroying our markets and economy due to greed and fraud.

In essence, my post can be wrapped up in these questions:

  1. Ethically, is this industry too far gone to recover any resemblance of credibility, trust and moral foundation?
  2. How will the real estate brokers weed out the bad actors? We know DFI is going after loan officers and others.

Fortunately, I know and work with quite a few agents and loan officers who genuinely try to do their very best for their customers. Unfortunately, many of them and others who work in real estate are caught in the enormous wake of the problems the fraudsters have created.