Nevada's attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto filed civil fraud charges against Lender Processing Services and two subsidiaries alleging the company engaged in a widespread fraud of forging foreclosure documents.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Clark County’s Eighth Judicial District Court, accuses Jacksonville, Fla.,-based Lender Processing Services (LPS) of forging signatures and fraudulently notarizing up to 4,000 documents a day in an effort to quickly process foreclosures on behalf of mortgage servicers.
The AG's office has not made allegations against any banks that hired LPS for the back-office functions of processing foreclosures.
Nevada claims LPS also demanded kickbacks from foreclosure law firms and called those payments “attorney’s fees” on invoices given to consumers and submitted in courts. Masto alleges the company improperly controlled the work of foreclosure attorneys, forcing them to churn out documents quickly in an assembly-line sweatshop environment.
“The robo-signing crisis in Nevada has been fueled by two main problems: chaos and speed,” Masto said in a statement.
LPS has conceded in the past that some of the signing practices at its Doc X subsidiary in Alpharetta, Ga., which was closed in 2010, were flawed. The company, which processes more than 50% of all foreclosures in the U.S., did not immediately respond Friday to requests for comment.
Last month, a Clark County grand jury indicted two of the processor's employees for overseeing teams of so-called “robo-signers” – people who signed thousands of mortgage assignments, lien releases and affidavits falsely claiming they had personal knowledge of the borrower’s finances. Robo-signing practices are at the heart of global settlement talks involving the five largest mortgage servicers and a coalition of about 45 state attorneys general.
The Nevada AG's office said it conducted a review of more than one million pages of documents and interviewed former LPS employees, mortgage servicers and other industry players about the practices of robo-signing.
Nearly a dozen state and federal agencies have launched civil investigations into the company's practices, Matso’s office has said.
