Released: December 06, 2007

FBI to heighten mortgage fraud probes

Source: Carrie Johnson and Tomoeh Murakami Tse, Washington Post (Free Registration)

The FBI today will launch a mortgage fraud task force in its Washington field office, joining a widening net of state and local investigators digging into the market crisis.

Investigators are seeking to uncover evidence of overvalued home appraisals, shoddy lending practices and alleged irregularities in the packaging and sale of groups of loans that were marketed to ordinary investors, state investment funds and big Wall Street banks.

Today the FBI will host the top federal prosecutors in the District and Northern Virginia as well as investigators from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Internal Revenue Service and the Small Business Administration.

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