Mortgage News
Two-thirds of defaulters have committed ‘soft fraud’
More than two-thirds of borrowers who default on their mortgage originally submitted applications with inaccurate information about their financial circumstances, according to CoreLogic Solutions.
CoreLogic, a mortgage and property analytics company that advises the majority of the top ten UK lenders, said that much more needed to be done to tackle such high frequency, low profile, ‘soft’ mortgage fraud in order to prevent losing millions more.
Its research, using CML statistics, suggested that more than 6500 of the repossession in Q2 2010 will have had inaccurate
The need to tackle soft fraud has been heightened as the number of mortgage defaults has risen significantly during the economic crisis and total fraud in the UK, which soft fraud contributes to, broke the £1bn barrier for the first time in H1 2010.
Beverley Houlbrook, fraud consultant for CoreLogic, said: “Although consumers are committing mortgage fraud while telling what they believe to be harmless white lies, this fact seems to be regularly overlooked by applicants and, although lenders check income and affordability, cases are still slipping through the net.”
The true value of mortgage fraud losses in the UK has still not been fully quantified. However, reported mortgage fraud rose by 2% in the first half of 2010, with losses quadrupling.
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