'Robin Hood' lawyer fights foreclosures with a passion

Robert Thompson seeks injunctions and files lawsuits to prevent home losses

For 34 years, Robert Thompson Jr. had been a business and labor lawyer — as was his father before him — defending corporations and financial institutions and even serving on several banks’ boards of directors.

But something happened to him two and half years ago that changed his

entire practice. Now, he challenges banks and financial institutions in
court, accusing them of wrongful foreclosure and outright fraud on behalf of individuals who are a step away from losing their homes.

The turning point for Thompson came at Christmas time, 2009. His mortgage servicer — with whom he had been embroiled in disputes over what he said were misapplied or lost checks, late fees for payments that had been made on time, unnecessary insurance costs and double billings for taxes — moved to foreclose on his home.

“I was a single father with three young children living with me in that house,” the silver-haired Thompson said during an interview in his Buckhead Thompson Law Group office filled with books about the financial industry and the economic crisis. “It was very upsetting.”

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Steps Toward Stopping Foreclosure & Seeking Court Relief

In the last several years homeowners have experienced an epidemic of foreclosure fraud, wrongful foreclosure, robosigning of affidavits and assignments, mortgage modification scams, assessment of thousands of dollars of mystery fees, late fees, drive by fees, photograph your house fees, and other homeowner abuse. Because of mortgage securitization fraud and abuse, lenders no longer having risk of loss, servicers being unsympathetic to economic hardship or lying to homeowners trying to get caught up, Congressional ineptitude at dealing with the mortgage crisis in America, and outright greed of so many on Wall Street and elsewhere, homeowners have been subjected to the worst ill-treatment, abuse, and foreclosures since the Great Depression. Millions have lost their homes.

Many of the foreclosures forced upon homeowners in all the states and particularly in Georgia, are fraudulent and unsupported by documentation and illegal under Georgia law. Unfortunately, since Georgia is a non-judicial foreclosure state, meaning no court receives the foreclosure process before the home is sold on the courthouse steps; most homeowners never have a chance to do anything to save their houses.

Surveys and studies throughout the country continuously confirm that may if not most foreclosures are not based on proper paperwork as required by law. In Georgia we feel certain that somewhere a foreclosure has been done properly, we just have not seen one yet. That is why we work with homeowners to fight foreclosure, and seek damages for the homeowner for an actual attempted wrongful foreclosure.

The process in GA is very straightforward. First, if you believe the scheduled foreclosure on your home is wrong and have documentation to prove it; the homeowner can usually go to the Superior Court of the County where the home is located and ask the judge for an injunction stopping the foreclosure. Injunctions or Temporary Restraining Orders are equitable remedies to stop a threatened wrong that will cause irreparable harm to the homeowner if allowed to proceed.

Second, if it is determined that any of the paperwork is wrong, fraudulent, or that the entity trying to foreclose has no right to do so, or that statutory legal procedure has not been followed-either before or after a foreclosure-the homeowner can also file a wrongful foreclosure (or attempted wrongful foreclosure) lawsuit against 1. The entity trying to or who has foreclosed on the home, who by law should be the lender, creditor, or Real Party in Interest; 2. The servicer to whom you have been making mortgage payments; 3. The real estate trust or investor who really is the creditor but is hiding behind the others; and or 4. The law firm handling the foreclosure and wrongfully selling your home on the courthouse steps the first Tuesday of every month.

In a wrongful foreclosure suit the homeowner can allege any number of possible causes of action depending on the circumstances. Some of the claims from our experience include wrongful foreclosure, slander of title, lack of standing, lack of notice, improper advertising, wrongful chain of default, improper assignment, breach of contract, quantum merit, fraud, violating the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA), the GA Fair Businesses Practice Act (FBPA), the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA), the Truth in Lending Act  (TILA), the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA), Consumer Protection Act (CPA), GA Fair Lending Act (7-GA-1-7-GA-11), equity stripping, predatory lending, breach of fiduciary duty, quiet title, intentional infliction of emotional distress, conversion, loan modification misrepresentation and fraud, false notarization, false company official (professional liability), civil conspiracy, fraud by forgery of mortgage, fraud by forgery of assignment, fraud by forgery of affidavit, or RICO claims. Damages can be direct, compensatory, punitive, or possibly doubled.

Take a look at your mortgage servicer, creditor, loan modifier, and their cronies. Do you trust them with the future of your family’s home?         

Robert Thompson Quoted in AJC story "Botched Paper Trail Creates Foreclosure Nightmare"

Trying ordeal shows system’s weaknesses

Atlanta Journal Constitution
Botched transfer leads to nightmare for owner. State lacks judicial review, but some say there are other remedies.
February 20, 2012
By J. Scot Trubey 

Helen Smith-Tyler’s foreclosure nightmare started with a repo notice on behalf of Bank of America — which didn’t even hold her mortgage.
Nearly two years later, the 58-year-old widow has filed personal bankruptcy and sued both the bank and a law firm, all part of an effort to keep her Lithonia home and undo the damage from a case of mistaken lender identity.

“It’s very stressful. There’s no sleep,” Smith-Tyler said.
Although her case stems from an unusual collision of events, critics of Georgia’s foreclosure process say it shows how few consumer protections the state offers, starting with the lack of so-called “judicial review” in which a court verifies basic facts before the process goes forward.

Her case also reflects the daunting task of keeping track of mortgage documentation that was created by the giddy days of the housing boom and the foreclosure and banking crisis that followed.
There’s a lot to keep track of in Georgia. The state has the fourth highest rate of foreclosures nationally, with 12,467 homes — about 1 in 328 — the subject of a filing in January alone, according to recent data from RealtyTrac. Many loans had been refinanced or sold by the original lender.
Smith-Tyler took out a loan in 2004 and said she refinanced in 2009 to take advantage of a lower interest rate.

Despite scraping by on a lower-wage restaurant job after being laid off from AT&T, Smith-Tyler said she was current on her mortgage at the time, although she also had substantial other debt of about $40,000 in lines of credit, according to her bankruptcy records. And she was a guarantor of her children’s student loans.

Things went awry when, just a few days after her refinancing closed, the servicer for both the original and refinanced mortgage, Florida-based Taylor Bean & Whitaker, was raided by federal regulators and then shut down. Its chairman was convicted last year of orchestrating a $3 billion mortgage fraud scheme.
Regulators assigned a Bank of America loan servicing subsidiary to assume servicing on thousands of Taylor Bean mortgages.

The problem was that Tay-lor Bean had not filed documents that would have shown Smith-Tyler’s old loan was paid off and closed via the refinancing, an attorney for Bank of America later told a bankruptcy judge.
Smith-Tyler said she wasn’t aware of Taylor Bean’s seizure. When she got a letter from Bank of America saying it was taking over her loan, she said she assumed it referred to the refinanced loan. But Bank of America was actually trying to collect payments on the old loan.
Then she started getting bills on behalf of another company, RoundPoint Mortgage, that was handling the refinanced loan.

She was unable to convince either company that the dual billing was an error, according to her suit. During a call with both companies, she said she was told to pay Bank of America, but after continuing to get dual bills she stopped paying either and set aside the money while trying to clear up the confusion.

In March 2009 McCalla Raymer, a law firm representing Bank of America, moved to foreclose. Smith-Tyler, who said she still had no clear explanation for the double billing, sought legal advice and filed for personal bankruptcy as a defensive measure.
“Bankruptcy is one of the sure ways to stop a foreclosure,” one of her attorneys, Joy Neismith, said.
Smith-Tyler continued to set aside mortgage payments, and her attorneys say she never would have fallen behind on the mortgage if not for the duplicate billing.
A claim by a third mortgage firm emerged in bankruptcy.

The flaws in the near-foreclosure on Smith-Tyler’s home were found through the evidence process in bankruptcy court, and then only after intervention by the U.S. Trustee Program, which acts as the watchdog of bankruptcy court, according to Smith-Tyler’s attorneys.

Slightly more than half the states, including Georgia, do not have judicial review of foreclosures, leaving bankruptcy or a lawsuit as the main avenues of dispute. Officials acknowledge it’s impossible to know how many improper foreclosures might have occurred in Georgia.

The industry’s stance is that Georgia foreclosure problems are isolated and that the non-judicial process is more efficient in clearing the backlog of repossessions.

Fraud has still occurred in many states with court intervention. A recent $25 billion settlement between the states and the five biggest mortgage firms will help correct abusive practices and offer more protection than judicial review, said Lauren Kane, a spokeswoman for state Attorney General Sam Olens.
Robert Thompson, an Atlanta lawyer who challenges foreclosure cases, said there are flaws in many foreclosure cases, and the bundling and selling of mortgages has made it harder to determine the true owners of many mortgages. “It’s chaos,” he said.

Bank of America has withdrawn its claims and its lawyer in court transcripts admitted it had no right to Smith-Tyler’s loan, or to months of payments she made after her refinance . The bank also was ordered to return more than $7,000 of Smith-Tyler’s mortgage payments for disbursal to Nationstar, which had taken over for RoundPoint and was determined to be the rightful servicer of her refinanced mortgage.
Smith-Tyler’s suit alleges Bank of America and McCalla Raymer filed a foreclosure they knew or should have known was wrong. It claims that a pre-foreclosure title search by Mc-Calla Raymer showed that her loan was refinanced in 2009. Yet the firm filed a document that essentially transferred the old loan to Bank of America as an active mortgage, the suit contends.

McCalla Raymer declined to comment. A spokesman for Bank of America Home Loans declined to comment about specifics of the case, but blamed the confusion on events surrounding the shut down of Taylor Bean.

Bank of America and McCalla Raymer denied their respective actions were reckless or forced Smith-Tyler into bankruptcy, according to court responses the defendants filed Friday.
Smith-Tyler remains in her home, making payments through bankruptcy. She doesn’t really know how much she owes.

She said the case turned her into a “hermit” on her quiet street.

“I love my home. That’s my pride and joy,” Smith-Tyler said. “Whatever it took to avoid [foreclosure], I wasn’t just going to walk away from it.”