Posts Tagged ‘Ameriquest’
In case you were wondering…
…what happened to Christopher Jared Warren, the Ameriquest-trained mortgage fraud wunderkind.
Coulda guessed, Ameriquest
As far as I can tell, former Ameriquest account executive (a grand term for the then 19-year-old) Christopher Jared Warren is making a desperate bid to make himself useful to the nation before facing law enforcement for his admitted crimes, but nonetheless his seven-page treatise on mortgage fraud (PDF), starring himself as primary evidence, is must reading. He recounts an epic tale of predatory sales, customer data theft, falsified documents, meth, coke and company junkets, and that’s just the setup.
His message now is that the mortgage fraud that metastasized during the bubble is not only still with us; it may be getting worse than before, thanks to the burgeoning creativity of young hustlers like himself in the face of out-of-touch enforcers: “I actually had an FBI agent ask me ‘how in this market with all the changes is it even still possible to get cash back on a purchase’. Any FBI agent who has to ask that question, shouldn’t be involved in a mortgage fraud investigation, period.”
Warren is likely exaggerating his case somewhat, in the apparent hope of having himself appointed mortgage fraud czar (”I am the man for the job, Chris Warren, have the management experience, the banking experience, and could assist in the oversight of the most major transformation of mortgage regulation without changing one guideline and still completely eliminate mortgage fraud and restore confidence in the American dream and the securities that that very dream provides for investors”). It would be nice to have him say some of this same things under oath sometime. But I won’t grade Warren down for poor grammar or worse morals — he’s got some worthwhile things to say.
How the homes we live in turned into the monsters that ate our economy and the United States became a nation obsessed with real estate.
The Latest
Organizations that matter
- Affordable Housing Centers of America
- Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute
- Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program
- Center for Budget and Policy Priorities
- Center for Responsible Lending
- Demos
- Drum Major Institute
- Joint Center for Housing Studies
- Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
- National Consumer Law Center
- National Housing Institute
- National Housing Trust
- National Low Income Housing Coalition
- National Training and Information Center
- Natn’l Community Reinvestment Coalition
- NEDAP
- New America Foundation
- PolicyLink
- Pratt Center for Community Development
- Revson Fellowship
- Smart Growth America
What Alyssa reads
- Baseline Scenario
- Ben Smith
- Bloomberg News
- Calculated Risk
- City Limits
- Consumer Law and Policy Blog
- Doug Henwood
- Felix Salmon
- Galleycat
- Housing Wire
- Mother Jones
- Next American City
- Paul Krugman
- PolicyCents
- Ryan Avent
- Shelterforce
- Street Level
- Talking Points Memo
- The Audit
- The Balance Sheet
- The Big Picture
Tags
American Prospect Ameriquest Andrew Cuomo Atlanta Barney Frank Bloomberg News Bloomsbury Bush Business Week California Clinton Community Reinvestment Act Consumer Financial Protection Agency Dean Baker Elizabeth Warren Fannie Mae Felix Salmon FHA financial stability foreclosures Freddie Mac Gale Cincotta Gretchen Morgenson Home Mortgage Disclosure Act homeownership Larry Summers loan modifications media mortgage-backed securities Mortgage Bankers Association mortgage brokers mortgage fraud mortgage suicides New York Times Obama Paul Krugman publishing Rick Santelli Salon subprime tenants Texas The Big Money Timothy Geithner Wall Street Journal