The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

The basic scheme—mass-producing and mismarking mortgages—was exacerbated by other major industrywide ethical failures. Many of these same firms, in their desperation to cut every conceivable cost en route to the creation of mortgages, knowingly engaged in mass perjury by creating whole departments of entry-level cubicle slaves devoted to “robo-signing”—read: inventing—chains of title and other key documents. In other cases, they hired outside companies to do the dirty work for them. In just one single locale, the clerk’s office in Essex County, Massachusetts, thirteen hundred different mortgage documents, including chains of title, were discovered to have been signed by a “Linda Green,” although the signatures were written in twenty-two different styles. “Linda Green” worked for a company called DocX, which at the height of the boom was processing about half of all the foreclosure documents in the United States.