The dollar volume of reported mortgage fraud activity has spiked this year, as have the volume of filings. But much of the activity was tied to crimes that were committed more than three years ago. Repurchases played a big roll in the latest findings.
U.S. financial institutions submitted 25,485 suspicious activity reports during the first three months of this year. Filings jumped from 19,420 SARs filed in the same period during 2010.
The findings were outlined in the first-quarter Mortgage Loan Fraud Update released by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The total only reflects filing by financial institutions.
The report indicated that mortgage fraud SARs accounted for 14 percent of the total 186,331 SARs filings during the latest period. The share of overall filings was higher than 12 percent a year earlier.
FinCEN found that 79 percent of this year’s SARs reports were made on fraud that occurred at least three years ago. In the year-earlier period, barely more than half of the filings were for crimes that occurred at least 36 months ago.
“FinCEN attributes the increase to large mortgage lenders conducting additional reviews after receiving demands to repurchase poorly performing mortgage loans,” the report said.
Nearly three-quarters of this year’s filings were made on transactions that fell between $100,000 and $500,000. In the first-quarter 2010, just 61 percent of SARs were for loans within that range while 26 percent were for loans less than $100,000.
An analysis of FinCEN’s data by MortgageDaily.com indicates that loans associated with first-quarter filings amounted to $9.8 billion, leaping from $6.2 billion during the same period last year.
During all of 2010, loans tied to SARs filing amounted to just $20.5 billion — suggesting full-year 2011 results will deteriorate significantly from last year.
By the sheer volume of filings, California was the worst state in the union.
In addition, the Golden State also had the most filings per capita. Contributing to California’s poor standing in this category were five-major metropolitan areas in the state that had five-highest rates in the nation.
Florida had the second-most filings of any state, followed by New York and Illinois.
Nevada was No. 2 based on per-capita filings, then North Carolina, Washington, D.C., and Florida.
