You may remember that there was one big criminal case in the foreclosure fraud scandal leading up to the settlement. Missouri Attorney General John Koster indicted Lorraine Brown, the founder and former President of the document processor DocX, for forgery and making false declarations on mortgage documents. The assumption here was that you could go up the chain from DocX, which has been shuttered since May 2010, to its corporate parent, Lender Processing Services, and then over to the big banks that hired LPS to falsify documents for them.

Well, that didn’t happen.

I just thought of something, if it is now acceptable to use forged and perjurious documents in foreclosure cases, DOCX, LPS and the other document mills have a huge new market available to them with homeowners. If forged and backdated allonges and assignments are OK, so too should be forged Satisfactions of Mortgage. Once the homeowner obtains a forged SAT from a document mill and files it with the county clerk, in theory, shouldn’t their foreclosure case be dismissed?

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 recorder’s offices across the country and carefully recording the transfers of land titles – to step up and deliver some measure of accountability on the banks for violations of law.