While mortgage fraud is rare, people do make applications where they lie about their incomes and where people try to get mortgages multiple times. According to real estate research firm CoreLogic, this is most frequent in Miami.
The new CoreLogic study covers the final quarter of last year. Each city has a fraud index. The higher the score, the higher the risk. The only city over 300 is Miami at 308, based on this fourth-quarter 2022 data.
Fraud risk has nothing to do with city size. Miami has a population of 6,173,008. The city with the next highest fraud risk is Poughkeepsie, whose population is 678,527. Its fraud risk figure is 245. Fraud risk in almost all cities with the worst fraud risk scores has risen over the previous.
The Justice Department has had to create a task force to handle the fraud risk problem. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr commented, “Our efforts to attack mortgage fraud must be, and are, concerted and coordinated. Working together, we can send a clear and straightforward message: Those who prey on vulnerable American homeowners cannot hide from the hand of the law. If you perpetrate mortgage fraud, we will find you and we will bring you to justice.”
What is clear from both the Justice Department statement and CoreLogic data is that the mortgage fraud problem is not going away. Here are five common mistakes people make paying off their mortgage.
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