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Foreclosure Fraud: First Criminal Charges Filed In Nevada Over Robo-Signing

The Nevada attorney general has indicted two midlevel staffers at a mortgage document company, Lender Processing Services, on a whopping 606 counts of felony and gross misdemeanor for directing employees to forge signatures and falsely notarize documents used to illegally foreclose on Nevada homeowners.

Nevada's is the first criminal indictment since last year's discovery of the nationwide "robo-signing" scandal, in which mortgage servicing companies and banks were processing foreclosures en masse at lightning speed by signing documents they neglected to review and falsifying information.

"The grand jury found probable cause that there was a robo-signing scheme which resulted in the filing of tens of thousands of fraudulent documents with the Clark County Recorder's Office between 2005 and 2008," said Nevada's chief deputy attorney general, John Kelleher, in a statement.

The indictment against the two employees, Gary Trafford and Gerri Sheppard, describes them as LPS title officers and California residents. Neither has been arrested, but the court has set bail at $500,000 each.

In a Thursday release, LPS said that it's cooperating with the investigation. It also asserted that no homeowners have been harmed: "Based on the company's reviews, LPS acknowledges the signing procedures on some of these documents were flawed; however, the company also believes these documents were properly authorized and their recording did not result in a wrongful foreclosure."

Prentiss Cox, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and a former assistant state attorney general, said it was admirable for Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto to pursue the robo-signing case. But, he added, "When criminal prosecutions are done for robo-signing, I would hope the target of those prosecutions would be the people who designed the system and profited from it, not just the low-level people doing what they were told."

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