Foreclosure Detectives Hunt for Lies - WSJ.com: "URBANDALE, Iowa—In two squat, suburban office-park buildings here, Richard Barrent is digging through loan files that could help decide who pays for the mortgage-paperwork debacle.
The former Wells Fargo & Co. quality-assurance manager's two-year-old company is part of a cottage industry of loan detectives obsessed with detecting fraud, misrepresentations and violations of underwriting guidelines. Such discoveries can be used as ammunition to force banks and other lenders to buy back loans from bond insurers, holders of mortgage-backed securities and other customers of forensic loan-review firms.
'There is a growing interest across the board' for such reviews, says Charles Cacici, managing member of Risk Management Group, a Brooklyn, N.Y., company that also scours mortgage files for problems. Competitors include Digital Risk, Clayton Holdings and Allonhill.
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Danny Wilcox Frazier for The Wall Street Journal
NUMBERS GAME: Barrent Group Chairman Richard Levitt, at left, with President Richard Barrent at Barrent Group in Iowa on Monday.
The tedious business, usually involving hundreds of pages per loan, has taken on new urgency since the foreclosure problems erupted in mid-September"
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