San Diego Housing Bubble News and Analysis

Isnt it weird how they called them "investors" and not victims. In any "investment" isnt there risk involved?

From the article: In a June 7 court filing, Grossman argued that Stonewood and Montecastro shouldn't be responsible for investors with "unclean hands" who knowingly signed false or incomplete documents.

Sadly, while I suspect the accused is likely quite shady, I suspect the "investors" gladly went down the rabbit hole committing little white frauds of their own the whole way.

Hendrix Montecastro and James Duncan orchestrated everything, down to the littlest detail. Most victims had very little back ground on purchasing homes, they were encouraged to trust the experts who knew the business and had the connections. Even if there were omitted items, many investors would not have known they were missing. Many submitted information to Stonewood as they would have done with any other mortgage company such as income, bank statements etc. Stonewood had a gang of insiders from top to bottom. Also, documents were allegedly forged. They even had their maid sign investors names. The truth will eventually be public no matter how badly they twist it.

Core Client.

Go here
http://www.coreclient.110mb.com/
and look for your picture.

It's probably there.

1st rule of defense...Blame the Victim. Duh!

"1st rule of defense...Blame the Victim. Duh!"

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Wrong!

You are not Victims. You willingly signed the fraudulent documents and agreed to participate in the housing Ponzi scheme for your own greedy benefit. "Investors" is a much more accurate euphemism, because you did assume great risk in exchange for the chance to get rich off the backs of the regular families looking to have a house to live in.

It is the regular families who cannot afford to buy a house thanks to the illegal run up in house prices who are the Victims.

I signed no fraudulent documents creep.
Not ONE!

I'm beginning to believe you have a personal grudge to bear.

Could your name Perhaps be Hendrix or James?

Hmmmmm........could be?

Maybe it really was YOUR signature?

Maybe you actually forged my initials and signature on docs?

Were YOU the one doing all the lying and passing yourself off as an 'EXPERT"???

You seem very petty and very bitter. Definitely small-minded.

I'll pray for you.

Hey...but Thanks for all the traffic you sent to the site!!

Conned,

Whoever signed the loan documents had to leave their thumb print and signature in the notary's log book. Also, the signer would have gotten a copy of the documents at the closing. It should be easy to tell who was present at the closing and who signed the documents.

If YOU didn't sign the papers, whose thumb print is in that book then?

don't worry conned, creeps like that have small penii and no friends.

you sound like a very good person, it's not your fault. you took those people into your heart and your home and you certainly didn't deserve to be treated the way you were. they should burn in hell for everything they've done.

out of curiosity, how much money was involved? how much did you have to put in for how much in returns?

The papers signed at closing are different than the papers I received back from the lender.
These papers weren't in my possession to change after the signing.
Just so happens that the 'notary' was one of 'them'.
That I can prove.

drunkle...give me a break..not in the mood to go cut a switch that you can use to beat me over the head with.

conned by crooks, so basically they forged your signatures while using your good name/credit to buy a house under your name without your knowledge/consent. If this were the case then there's nothing to worry about as you can prove you didn't purchase the house. Just go to court to prove this - get your money/name/credit rating back. Sounds like a logical solution to me.

I feel for anyone who was conned, but I have also managed to steer clear of every get rich quick scheme that has come my way ever since I lost $20 bucks from a three card monte game I found while walking down the street when I was 17 in LA. I remember thinking I was very stupid to think I could get something for nothing. Simple rule-if it was that easy to make money then everyone would be doing it. I am sorry that you had to learn this lesson with larger stakes. Be honest though, didn't a little voice tell you that something was wrong? I hope you get your money back, I also hope the real crooks get a good long prison sentence and I hope you take away a good ass whooping from it and learn your lesson. Please own your side of it and at least acknowledge that the only thing that put you in jeopardy was your own greed and stupidity.

It takes forever to get into court. 3 years to get a civil trial. That's 3 years of my credit in the toilet, a house in foreclosure, and ruined credit.

They forged the fraudulent stuff.

For instance..I signed papers that showed my 401k balance. Papers I got back from lender now show that I have an additional $157k in an account at Jovane Investments. That wasn't there when I signed it.

Many here shoot first and maybe ask questions later.

There is so much that happened...can't sum it up by putting the victims in the same boat at the crooks. It is much more complicated than that.

What is it? You want me to confess that I am greedy?

Nope...that wasn't it at all. Just wanted to get ahead of huge child support payments to a greedy ex-wife and send my husband to seminary. If That is greedy, so be it in your tiny little minds.

This tiny little mind knows it's limitations and when it makes mistakes, tends to look for it's part in them so they won't be repeated. It also recognizes that it ALWAYS takes two to tango and while a murder or rape victim has no say in their crime. A victim of a con typically does. Blame the universe, blame everyone but yourself, then you can rest assured that years from now you will be angrily bitter over someone else taking advantage of you because you didn't learn your lesson. It's the same victim mentality that I see people use in jobs or relationships they are unhappy in. It's always someone else's fault.

Like I said, I wish you well, I hope you get your money back, I hope the crooks get what they deserve, I also hope you learned a lesson.

END RANT

CbC, you may have been conned but I think you were probably also complicit. I don't know of any child support payments that are crushing compared to the earning power of the person paying. Further, the "greedy ex-wife" is probably spending more every month on the kids than she is receiving. From your "my s@$t don't stink" tone, I bet you are a step-monster. I've seen quite a few doozies. Finally, some of the most crooked people I have ever met cloaked their greed under a mantle of religion and were pastors.

oh, I learned a lesson alright<---but WHY would you care whether I do or not? What's it to you?

No one is to be trusted. No one.
Future investments will only be w/ large well-known firms.
Did I say trust no man? especially someone in RE.

We want you to see what we see.

A multi-BILLION dollar fraud setup in the pursuit of greed that will wreck and has wrecked the community for thousands for years to come.

On one hand, we have a pied piper allegedly leading the charge with hundreds of "investors" for the fleecing in a very complicated and very slow real estate deals that involves many verifications along the way.

On the other, "victims" claiming the pied piper and his conspiracy did this fraud ring, and did it to hundreds bilking untold millions.

The catch? If the victims aren't victims, they're participants in multi-million dollar cases of mortgage fraud themselves. Do you really wonder why the rest of us cast a jaundiced eye on those claiming to be scammed?

If they've forged your signatures through all the purchases, you've been wronged. Maybe we'll be wrong in the end, and it is a grand conspiracy forging signatures and involving dozens in a criminal enterprise bilking innocents.

Or as my gut tells me, maybe at best, the naive investors are negligent to the point of criminally aiding and abetting in the pursuit easy profits and at worse, active participants in committing serial mortgage fraud wrecking the American dream for tens of thousands of Southern Californians.

PD
Ooohhh getting out the bigger sticks are we???
Clueless....feel pretty high and mighty don't you?

Actually I am both...a Step-mother And a mother. The ex-wife spends the huge payments in Vegas every other w/e.
Not on the child. So there.

You go ahead and believe your little 'alternate universe'.

yawn....you bore me as your comments reflect your narrow-mindedness. Bet you pay CS too don't ya?

It looks like the courts will have to decide who is guilty of what crimes and who owes what money to whom, etc. The role of the investors seems in question but there doesn't seem to be much question about the role of the ringleaders at all. I wonder if this is the largest real estate scam in history? I've never heard of anything on this scale before. Has anyone else? How could the ringleaders think they could get away with it? Aren't they afraid of getting capped?

And you would honestly believe that all of us victims would have willingly, knowingly done that?

We assert that we believed we were dealing in legitimate real estate transactions.

It may be very difficult for a seasoned RE expert to fall for it, but in the end the truth will come out and you will be surprised at how extensive this fraud is.

It is our belief that This IS the largest mortgage fraud in history.

Stay-tuned.

CbC, I suspect that most people here believe that you were ripped off to large degree, probably with a great deal of help from fraudulent activities. What people have a hard time swallowing, however, is that you have NO blame whatsoever in this situation. I'm with PD here; you probably had some degree of complicity - however small - in what happened here. And the reason is that you were greedy, plain and simple. That's not to say that you and your co-plaintiffs deserved your fate, but were it not for such greed you wouldn't be in this mess. Had you read all of the documents involved, done background checks on everyone involved - basically had you done proper due diligence - it's unlikely you'd be in this mess. I wish you the best of luck - you were conned. But had greed, naivete, and - let's say it - some degree of ignorance, not reared their ugly heads all at the same time you wouldn't be posting here.

One question I've got, though, is where God was during this whole thing. This whole mess was His will, right? So, as a Christian, you should have nothing to worry about, right? Also, instead of pursuing these con men shouldn't you just turn the other cheek and forgive them? Pope John Paul forgave that guy that shot him after all. What about that whole "to err is human, to forgive divine" thing? I guess I'm just having a hard time grasping the Christian angle in this situation.

How about......
I was put here to STOP them. That was my purpose. They made a BAD choice in choosing me as a Core Client. I will pursue justice with vigor.

Ok, I admit to being too trusting, naive, ignorant of the RE process and documents, and I did Not hire a PI to investigate these people Prior to investing (do YOU hire a PI? Because that is what it would have taken to uncover the garbage on these yahoos).

Why is it soooo important to you to beat up the victim and get a confession of unadulterated greed out of us? Does that make you feel better? Stand Taller? Stick out your chest further? Been able to brag "THAT NEVER would have happened to me!" with confidence? Feel more Superior?

Isn't it the crooks James, Hendrix, Maurice, Helen, Charlie, et al who your anger should be directed at? Or do you secretly admire the fact that they pulled it off?

CbC, I neither receive child support nor pay child support. In my experience, those who complain that the ex is greedy in their requests for child support are usually the greedy ones who don't want to live up to their responsibilities. Since you have adamantly refused to take any responsibility for the financial predicament in which you now find yourself, is it any wonder that I have questioned who exactly is greedy regarding child support?

There are other people posting here who were victims of this scam who are taking responsibility for their own part in their downfall. I respect that.

I feel a great deal of sympathy for those who are very uneducated or who have a low IQ and got caught up in this scheme. The more sophisticated the person who got pulled in, the less sympathy I have for them. I am sure there were many warning signs.

I was pretty harsh in my previous post. You have come across as a very unpleasant person and I responded in kind. I hope you are a good mother and a good step-mother.

CbC, To answer your first question, yes, I hire a law firm to do an extensive background check on EVERY key person in every investment I make (if I haven't worked with them before). But I admit that's fairly unusual - but I'm a professional investor and invest other people's money as well as my own so it's part of my fiduciary duty to do these sorts of things.

It's funny, you view people who question your "purity" in these transactions as "beating up on you." I think we merely view it as placing a small bit of the blame where it deserves to be placed: with you. We're not beating up on you, we're just calling it like we see it. You say tomato, I say tomahto.

I think EVERY poster reading this agrees that you and all of your co-plaintiffs have been wronged and should be very angry with James, et al. No doubt about it and I don't think ANYONE here thinks otherwise or "secretly admires the fact that they pulled it off", to use your words. That you would think this possible shows just how little time you've spent on this board. Here's the problem: YOU'RE here and posting; James, Hendrix, et al are not. If they were I can assure you that we'd be pillorying them with abandon... you're getting off easy, frankly.

But, not to worry. Even if you end up BK, you're still quite lucky: over 3 billion people on this planet live on less than $2 per day and tens of millions die of starvation every year. You've had the good fortune to reap your God's favor and live in the United States while others are clearly in His great disfavor. In the whole scheme of things your problems aren't so great, are they?

There isn't a single person on this board who doesn't have the utmost in contempt for those individuals responsible for the fraud. HOWEVER there also isn't anyone here who will sympathize with the people who were gambling on housing futures and who were knowingly agreeing to mortgage payments they could never hope to pay.

You can't tell us that you didn't understand that an Adjustable Rate Mortgage resets after a certain period of time or that those payments would vastly exceed your personal abilities to pay. I can figure out what a mortgage payment will be on a purchase price in about 20 seconds. There are so many online mortgage calculators it might have taken you 10 minutes to find one and figure out the same. You didn't find out because you didn't bother to find out. Whose fault is that?

It doesn't take a private investigator or an outside expert to understand that racking 2 or 3 or 7 home purchases on a middle-range salary is not economically possible without a lottery-sized amount of risk, or that banks will not knowingly lend more than what a borrower can repay out of their earnings.

Whether you did it because you believe God wants the righteous to prosper or because you were being an agressive investor matters not. The fact remains that most of you signed on to purchase investment vehicles, sometimes totalling million dollars worth in multiple transactions; you were not just purchasing shelter for yourself and your family.

When my kids were 18 and were receiving all these credit card offers they all knew better than to get more than one card or to use those cards for anything other than emergencies. They didn't need an outside expert to guide them towards making an informed decision about their use of credit. I have to believe on at least some level that all the adults involved in this tragic scheme had some understanding of what their limitations were and made conscious decisions to "be bold" and ignore those limitations.

Had your gamble paid off I'm pretty sure you guys wouldn't be whining about the fraud it would have taken for that to happen, so I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for your losses. Without a doubt, your agressiveness has contributed to the problems the housing market in your area now faces. If not for your ill-advised purchases its possible housing prices in that area might not have gotten quite so high. 1,000 units is a lot of inventory to soak up. In fact, you should give some consideration to the idea that you guys are partially responsible for some of the losses currently being suffered by other buyers who were competing with you when you bought.

I don't mess around with investing in derivatives because I don't understand them. You should consider the same. Next time maybe you should stick to what you know.

Actually several of your co-posters feel we should be jailed, mocked, drawn and quartered, humiliated, spit upon, and have a giant L tattoed on our chests.

To be sure I will recommend this site to all my friends for warm and loving support during this very difficult time in our lives. Thank you for making it a very safe environment in which to vent and the memories so memorable.

You'd probably be a tad bit 'disagreeable' if you had just been accused of fraud when you were actually the victim of it. Y'all provide such a warm welcome and lots of hospitality.

Y'all play nicely now. ya hear?!!

Which is simpler possibility?

A) everybody involved bent the rules "a little bit" in the pursuit of quick profits.

B) the ring leader and cohorts with the aid of numerous appaisers, escrow companies, RE agents and mortgage brokers conspired to defraud 100s out of their homes and then committed and passed forgeries to commit those hundreds of investors to multiple fraudulent purchases to bilk them.

CbC, you said: "Actually several of your co-posters feel we should be jailed, mocked, drawn and quartered, humiliated, spit upon, and have a giant L tattoed on our chests."

I've read all the posts in this thread and haven't noticed anything of the sort. Perhaps you can point me to a specific post indicating otherwise?

From a big picture perspective, I just don't think you should be too worried about all of this stuff. God will take care of it, right? I'm sure this is all just part of his Plan. Maybe you're just getting hung up on the details.

I am certainly not here to cast judgement on anyone, but I absolutely can't imagine ever risking my house/shelter/security to try to get rich quick.
Back in 2004-05 we had a "friend" a real estate person who tried to convence my husband and me that we should take equity from our home and parlay it into 5 or 6 other houses. We about fell off of the couch laughing, and he couln't get over how "financially conservative" we were. He assurd us we were missing out. In fact he did dip into his home equity and buy 5 more houses, we didn't and here we sit in our 1 and only 22 year old sfr, and a mortgage I could make working at Baskin' Robbins.
I often wonder how much sleep he gets at night? I bet not as much as we do, lol.