YouTube: a place to find political satire, old “Saturday Night Live” skits, your friends’ home videos and … professional foreclosure advice?
After learning that 25 percent of delinquent borrowers go to the Internet before their bank or lender for mortgage information, McLean-based mortgage giant Freddie Mac posted a video re-enactment of a common foreclosure scam on YouTube to warn at-risk borrowers about it.
“It’s certainly starting to pick up hits,” said company spokesman Brad German “We’re getting e-mails from people with a story about some mother or aunt who they wish had seen it, because they had fallen prey to a scam like this and lost their home.”
The video, posted on Wednesday, had racked up 2,700 hits by Thursday afternoon. It illustrates a scheme in which a shady investor identifies homeowners at risk of foreclosure and promises to pay off their mortgages, often asking for an up-front fee and tricking them into signing over the deeds to their homes. Once he has the deed, the investor can use it to borrow money and can leave the owner’s mortgage loan unpaid.
“There are lots of different variations on it,” German said. “But at the end of the day, the loan goes into default, and the homeowner who thought they were taking steps to protect themselves may end up without their home.”
The FBI listed foreclosure fraud as an “emerging scheme” in its 2007 fraud report. It is difficult to quantify how widespread it is, however, as many homeowners don’t report it out of embarrassment and the FBI doesn’t separate it from other types of mortgage fraud in its statistics.
