Originaly by Jonathan Foxx:  The ancient Roman god, Janus, was two-faced—his back-to-back visages looking at the past and into the future—a symbolic representation of ineluctable transitions through the passage of time, a reminder of essential change from one condition to another, whether for better...

Federal Trade Commission Release: At the request of the Federal Trade Commission, a federal court has halted a bogus mortgage foreclosure prevention operation that misrepresented both the “loss mitigation” services it offered and the earnings potential of the business opportunity it sold. The FTC...

Originaly by Bill Rankin: At 92, unsteady on his feet and hard of hearing, Harold Williams needed someone to care for him. After returning to his Decatur home from a stay in a rehab center, Williams answered an ad placed by Rukhsana Burton’s caregiver company, signed her up for $14 an hour and had...

If you have a mortgage with Countrywide Financial, may want to check your credit report. This advice follows the arrest of a Countrywide employee the FBI says sold Social Security numbers and other sensitive information on as many as 2 million customers.     The arrest was the result of a joint investigation...

Originaly by Zac Bissonnette: There has been a lot of coverage of the housing bubble and of the sloppiness in the mortgage industry that allowed the market to overheat based on loans to people who couldn’t pay them back. But for a quick, interesting, easy to understand introduction, you can’t...

DuPage County State’s Attorney Joe Birkett announced today that Vincent Arena, 52 (d.o.b. 10/31/1956) of 1070C Heritage Hill Drive, Naperville, was sentenced to four years in the Illinois Department of Corrections for defrauding the All Saints Catholic Academy in Naperville and several financial institutions...

In the wake of the bursting of the housing bubble, you’d think there’d be a significant number of investigations into criminal wrongdoing and accounting fraud, similar to what occurred after the S&L crisis and bursting of the stock bubble in 2000.But two years into the crisis the FBI...

Fremont General to pay $10 million to end predatory lending suit. Massachusetts taxpayers just got another apologetic payout from a firm that profited from the subprime lending binge. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said Tuesday that bankrupt subprime giant Fremont General ( FMT - news...

Mortgage fraud has increased so dramatically in the San Joaquin Valley that a task force of federal, state and local agencies has been formed to fight back. The FBI, IRS, Secret Service, Department of Housing and district attorneys in Fresno, Tulare and other counties are among those involved. Their...