Results 1 to 9 of 9

Thread: Florida company stands its' ground

  1. #1 | Top
    Guns Guns Guns Guest

    Default Florida company stands its' ground

    Four years after the crash, most financial institutions still aren’t equipped to find evidence of fraud in the toxic loans crippling their balance sheets.

    So they outsource the job to Digital Risk.

    The company’s CEO, Peter Kassabov, calls Digital Risk the “watchdog of the financial world.”

    Demand for watchdogs is high: the company, which has 1,100 employees, plans to double its workforce by the end of this year.

    Kassabov’s recruits tend to have underwriting experience; many are refugees of the housing bust.

    One such hire was George Zimmerman, the man who killed Trayvon Martin in February (Zimmerman says he acted in self-defense).

    At the time of the shooting, Zimmerman worked as an auditor at Digital Risk, and before that, he was a mortgage broker.


    The company spends about $10,000 to train each new employee in the art of fraud prevention and detection. Credit reports are pulled; ex-spouses are contacted; Digital Risk’s proprietary software is deployed.

    Once problems are uncovered, clients can try to recover money. (Say Digital Risk finds evidence of fraud among mortgages that have since been sold to an investor. The investor can use that evidence to force the bank that issued the mortgages to buy them back.)

    The information that analysts dig up unsettles Alpan.

    “There’s nothing you can hide,” he says. “This is why auditors are so paranoid.”


    Kassabov started Digital Risk in 2005 with seven employees.

    Mindful of a lesson he learned during the dot-com boom (“If something goes very fast up, it’ll go down just as quick”), he and his partners designed software to give loan underwriters access to detailed financial information about borrowers.

    Banks were impressed, Kassabov says, but feared the product would slow business.

    Why verify income when there were mortgages to be bundled and sold?

    That was then.

    Today, Digital Risk says it saves its clients a combined $5 billion a month.

    Alpan (whose name has been changed, as his company’s policy forbids unauthorized employees to speak to the media) spends eight hours a day at this desk in Digital Risk’s office building in suburban Maitland, Florida, reconstructing the exact circumstances that led so many Americans to buy houses they couldn’t afford.

    The cases he has seen reveal a country gone berserk: a woman in Ann Arbor who refinanced her home five times in five years but neglected to tell her lender that she had quit her job; a concrete finisher in Las Vegas who applied for 15 mortgages in one week; pastors—dozens of them—who doctored bank statements, bought houses they couldn’t pay for, and then filed for bankruptcy.

    “The nice thing about pastors is that their church shares information when asked,” Alpan says. “Pastors are always an easy claim.”

    Like Zimmerman, Alpan used to work on the other side of the industry, at a firm that sometimes handed out loans to the undeserving.

    Not that its loan officers were in any position to pass judgment: some had been fired from previous jobs for sexual misconduct; others were alcoholics struggling to pay child support.

    Most were skilled at bullying borrowers into signing.

    When one man didn’t have the gas money to come in and sign papers, an officer drove the papers to him.

    One Digital Risk employee came from a brokerage whose in-house motto was “Copy, paste, cut, delete. We’re not done until the loan’s complete!”

    http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...ors_picks=true

  2. #2 | Top
    Join Date
    May 2012
    Posts
    36,465
    Thanks
    16,662
    Thanked 20,736 Times in 14,331 Posts
    Groans
    0
    Groaned 1,387 Times in 1,305 Posts

    Default

    I don't think what banks did was fraudulent. They didn't do their due diligence, because they knew the paper would be in someone else's portfolio before the ink was dry.

    Now...appraisers, and especially ratings agencies acted fraudulently every day of the week. Likewise with many on Wall St, who were pushing garbage on investors, while taking short positions against the same product.
    Once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

  3. #3 | Top
    Guns Guns Guns Guest

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Althea View Post
    I don't think what banks did was fraudulent. They didn't do their due diligence, because they knew the paper would be in someone else's portfolio before the ink was dry. Now...appraisers, and especially ratings agencies acted fraudulently every day of the week. Likewise with many on Wall St, who were pushing garbage on investors, while taking short positions against the same product.
    Did you know that George Zimmerman was involved?

  4. #4 | Top
    Join Date
    May 2012
    Posts
    36,465
    Thanks
    16,662
    Thanked 20,736 Times in 14,331 Posts
    Groans
    0
    Groaned 1,387 Times in 1,305 Posts

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by \\()// View Post
    Did you know that George Zimmerman was involved?
    Nope. Evidently, he was employed by an auditing firm that is auditing the wrong agencies.
    Once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

  5. #5 | Top
    Join Date
    Mar 2008
    Posts
    47,970
    Thanks
    4,579
    Thanked 3,084 Times in 2,618 Posts
    Groans
    3,368
    Groaned 2,119 Times in 1,992 Posts

    Default

    althea is obsessed with legion troll

    yours truly,

    onceler

  6. #6 | Top
    Guns Guns Guns Guest

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Althea View Post
    Nope. Evidently, he was employed by an auditing firm that is auditing the wrong agencies.
    Quote Originally Posted by \\()// View Post
    One such hire was George Zimmerman, the man who killed Trayvon Martin in February (Zimmerman says he acted in self-defense).

    At the time of the shooting, Zimmerman worked as an auditor at Digital Risk, and before that, he was a mortgage broker.
    http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...ors_picks=true
    .

  7. #7 | Top
    Join Date
    May 2012
    Posts
    36,465
    Thanks
    16,662
    Thanked 20,736 Times in 14,331 Posts
    Groans
    0
    Groaned 1,387 Times in 1,305 Posts

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by \\()// View Post
    .
    And?
    Once in a while you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

  8. #8 | Top
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Posts
    61,490
    Thanks
    1,041
    Thanked 3,617 Times in 2,816 Posts
    Groans
    1,008
    Groaned 1,328 Times in 1,225 Posts

    Default

    so digital risk killed an unarmed teen wearing a hoodie?
    A sad commentary on we, as a people, and our viewpoint of our freedom can be summed up like this. We have liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, yet those very people look at Constitutionalists as radical and extreme.................so those liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans must believe that the constitution is radical and extreme.

  9. #9 | Top
    Join Date
    May 2012
    Posts
    2,736
    Thanks
    698
    Thanked 1,182 Times in 854 Posts
    Groans
    107
    Groaned 133 Times in 122 Posts

    Default

    I dunno. I am confused as to the relevance of this factoid.

Similar Threads

  1. FOX News reports: Brave cop stands his ground
    By Guns Guns Guns in forum Current Events Forum
    Replies: 0
    Last Post: 05-29-2012, 09:16 PM
  2. First They Came For The Lemonade Stands…
    By Mr. T in forum General Politics Forum
    Replies: 4
    Last Post: 09-03-2011, 05:05 PM
  3. That's all I can stands....
    By Cancel 2016.2 in forum Current Events Forum
    Replies: 18
    Last Post: 02-23-2011, 06:40 PM
  4. Laura Stands By Her Man
    By leaningright in forum Current Events Forum
    Replies: 0
    Last Post: 04-28-2010, 01:05 PM
  5. We know where Letterman stands!
    By Jarod in forum Current Events Forum
    Replies: 8
    Last Post: 09-25-2008, 05:16 AM

Bookmarks

Posting Rules

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •