By Ted Rall

October 21, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- SAN FRANCISCO--What would happen to you if you got caught forging a mortgage application? You'd go to jail. And rightly so.

In one case in Florida, an employee of GMAC Mortgage admitted under oath that he personally forged 10,000 foreclosure affidavits. This low-level schlub is the tip of the tip of a massive iceberg, one of countless "robo-signers" whom voracious banks including GMAC, Bank of America, Citibank and JPMorganChase hired in order to kick American families out of their homes as quickly as possible.

Ignoring state banking laws, which require bank officers to review each foreclosure document to make sure all the facts are correct, banks instead hired low-wage "Burger King kids," as B of A execs called them, to sign thousands of foreclosures they never looked at. Many were signed under someone else's name.

Hundreds of thousands of foreclosures--maybe millions--were processed illegally by these huge banks gone wild. "Behind the question of improper foreclosure documentation lies a more important issue of whether lenders even have legal standing to foreclose because they lack the original mortgage note as required by law," reports The New York Times.

One guy got evicted from his house in Florida despite the fact that his mortgage had been completely paid off years earlier. Thousands of people who purchased illegally foreclosed properties may not have legal title.

Prosecutors in Ohio, Florida and at least 20 other states are investigating one of the biggest acts of wholesale fraud in the history of American business.

When the scandal broke on October 8th the banks declared a temporary moratorium on foreclosures. Two weeks later, they declared the whole fuss a simple matter of paperwork and resumed their happy work of reducing millions of jobless Americans to homelessness.

Read the rest of this article on Information Clearing House