Monday, April 12, 2010

Enough fraud to make you wanna cry.

Have you had enough lies, misstatements, theft and outright fraud yet?  It seems as if every time we uncover another lie during the course of our story, there's a much bigger one waiting for us around the corner, whether its from the guy who claims he's a victim of identity theft, a prosecutor lying about the evidence or a cop lying about the events surrounding his investigation of the Bernardo Barrera mortgage fraud.  


Let's talk about the "victim" in the Bernardo Barrera mortgage fraud case.  The state would have us believe that one of the "victims" in this case is Mr. Bernardo Barrera himself, after all, if you believe the line of bull$hit that assistant state attorney Bill Kostrzewski is feeding us, Mr. Barrera unknowingly had his identity stolen by the fraudsters who used it to defraud Citi Mortgage of nearly half a million dollars.  That's all well and good, but based on the research we've done and the documents that we've unearthed, it's impossible to believe that line of $hit.  


So then who's left?  Obviously the victim then is Citi Mortgage themselves now isn't it?  They're the ones that shelled out the money for the Oak Avenue Mortgage fraud, so they're the ones that got screwed regardless of whether or not Bernardo Barrera was involved in the fraud.  Now, it's easy enough to blame the poor investigation of this fraud on dimwit Detective Jorge Baluja of the Miami Dade County Mortgage Fraud Task force who was working under the direction of Assistant State Attorney Bill Kostrzewski, but what about Citi Mortgage?  Didn't they do their own investigation?  Of course they did, the state lists an investigator from Citi Mortgage in the case file, so how the hell did this investigator conclude that Mr. Barrera was a victim of identity theft?  Especially since the most damaging documents against Mr. Barrera came from Citi Mortgage's own files?  Are there stupid people EVERYWHERE?


Hardly.  None of these people that we've been talking about are stupid (except the cop), these are all people with an agenda that are using this case to further their goals.  The prosecutor threw this case together to make a headline and perhaps prove that his grizzled old ass is still relevant, Mr. Barrera got himself out from under a massive "organized scheme to defraud", etc.  But how could Citi Mortgage have benefited from erroneously concluding that the Oak Avenue home mortgage was a fraud?  What would be the advantage of Citi ignoring the documents in their own files that PROVE that their conclusions of Mr. Barrera's identity being stolen was wrong?  Our theory has always been that Citi had some sort of insurance that would reimburse them in the event of fraud, otherwise why would they ignore what's obvious to everyone else?  There had to be some sort of financial incentive for Citi to classify this case as a fraud.

How the hell can we prove our theory?  We're nobody, we don't have subpoena powers like the cops do, we certainly can't pick up the phone and call the parties involved and demand documents from the people involved, let's not forget we're just a blog on the last page of the internet literally sifting through the garbage that the state decided to dump in the case file.  How the hell can we make any kind of meaningful conclusions based on such little evidence, especially since we now know that the state has been hiding the most important bits of evidence?  Easily.  When the people who put this case together on the state's side have so little knowledge of what's going on and what their case is about, they have a tendency of overlooking the importance of certain documents, documents like this one...

Citi Mortgage Fraud Investigator Stating That FPI Will Cover Citis Claim of Mortgage Fraud                                                                   

Very nice isn't it?  Here we have a correspondence between Citi Mortgage's fraud investigator and someone else who we can assume also works at Citi mortgage where they state that a company called FPI has concluded that there was fraud and that they will honor the claim.  Does that sound like they may be talking about some sort of insurance "claim"?  It sure does to us!  If that's the case then, the insurance company covers the loss and Citi get's their money back.  That sounds like a fantastic incentive for Citi to run a half ass investigation and conclude that there was identity theft now doesn't it?

What a mess.

7 comments:

  1. The plot thickens...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Why not call C. ?Ritchey?. Just because you investigated this case better than her doesn't mean she is a slacker. If she is young she just might put too much faith in the MPD and Fl ASA. Her office must have dozens of these frauds organized by the MPD and if they aren't getting slammed on this one they are getting slammed on some of those. Straighten them out.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes, the plot thickens, to the consistency of a steaming pile of horse shit.

    John, Citi won't get "straightened out" simply because there's no economic incentive for them to do so. If indeed we are right, they've already been paid nearly $500k from an insurance policy to cover their loss, why would they want to mess that up now?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Two reasons Citi will be interested are
    1 - There are other frauds they are reviewing now out of Miami and they need to know not to trust the MPD. Really any PD can't be relied on too much but MPD are proven to be unbelievable.
    2 - Fraud investigators don't like to get taken.

    Who is FPI anyway?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Great job but youre wasting your time. If there's any admission of the guy you're writing about being involved then the entire house of cards comes down, the states case, the insurance money the lender may have recieved.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  7. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete