Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Last Friday, Rachel Maddow featured Jeff Thigpen the courageous register of deeds in Guilford County, North Carolina, who has sued MERS and leading banks over faulty documents filed at his office. Rachel calls it an “exclusive” though I had the Thigpen lawsuit for [...]

While Eric Schneiderman’s MERS lawsuit mostly crashed and burned, another suit against the electronic registry, filed just yesterday, appears to have more determination behind it. Jeff Thigpen, the register of deeds for Guilford County, North Carolina, sued MERS, the document processing company Lender Processing Services and several banks and loan servicers, using as evidence the [...]

“It was a bust.” That’s what Guilford County register of deeds Jeff Thigpen told me about his visit to the White House last Friday. Many were intrigued by the surprise announcement that Thigpen would be part of a reception and policy briefing some of the nation’s brightest young legislators. He has been at the forefront [...]

Time for some more surprises. I have written about registers of deeds and their role in the foreclosure crisis extensively, in particular the work of Jeff Thigpen, the North Carolina-based register who checked thousands of documents in his recording office and found all kinds of irregularities. Thigpen and a few other registers have attempted for [...]

Shahien Nasiripour’s latest on the foreclosure fraud settlement asserts that mortgage servicers expect to pay up to $20 billion to settle legal claims from state and federal regulators. They apparently have gotten the message that the fraud allegations are serious enough to rise to this standard. But the talks have not ironed out how much [...]

My article in The American Prospect about the heroic registers of deeds working to present evidence that banks committed massive fraud in their documentation and processing of mortgages and foreclosures. Here’s an excerpt: But Jeff Thigpen, the register of deeds in Guilford County, North Carolina, a county of about 465,000 in the center of the [...]

Federal regulators simply aren’t that interested in investigating foreclosure fraud and laying down the appropriate punishments. Tom Miller is too busy deflecting criticism about massive campaign contributions from the banking sector to run a proper state-based investigation. So it’s actually come down to the registers of deeds – the unassuming public servants working in county [...]

Given the reluctance for criminal prosecutions at the state and federal level over foreclosure fraud, whatever meaningful sanctions that result will have to come from the courts, or from investors seeking putbacks. And those will only be monetary, though they have the potential to be crippling. That has been true for some time. But there’s [...]