From Reuters:

The federal government, as has been widely noted, has pressed few criminal cases against major lenders or senior executives for the events that led to the meltdown of 2007. Finding hard evidence has proved difficult, the Justice Department has said.

The government also hasn’t brought any prosecutions for dubious foreclosure practices deployed since 2007 by big banks and other mortgage-servicing companies.

…

Foreclosure-related case files in just one New York federal bankruptcy court, for example, hold at least a dozen mortgage documents known as promissory notes bearing evidence of recently forged signatures and illegal alterations, according to a judge’s rulings and records reviewed by Reuters. Similarly altered notes have appeared in courts around the country.

Banks in the past two years have foreclosed on the houses of thousands of active-duty U.S. soldiers who are legally eligible to have foreclosures halted. Refusing to grant foreclosure stays is a misdemeanor under federal law.

The U.S. Treasury confirmed in November that it is conducting a civil investigation of 4,500 such foreclosures. Attorneys representing service members estimate banks have foreclosed on up to 30,000 military personnel in potential violation of the law.

In Alabama, a federal bankruptcy judge ruled last month that Wells Fargo & Co. had filed at least 630 sworn affidavits containing false “facts,” including claims that homeowners were in arrears for amounts not yet due.

Wells Fargo “took the law into its own hands” and disregarded laws banning perjury, Judge Margaret A. Mahoney declared.

And in thousands of cases, documents required to transfer ownership of mortgages have been falsified. Lacking originals needed to foreclose, mortgage servicers drew up new ones, falsely signed by their own staff as employees of the original lenders – many of which no longer exist.

But the mortgage-foreclosure mess has yet to yield any federal prosecution against the big banks that are the major servicers of home loans.

More from Yves Smith:

As readers of this blog know, this isn’t close to a complete list. You can add foreclosing on homes where there is no mortgage, foreclosing on burned-down homes where the insurer has made payment in full, mortgage baits and switches at closings and telling borrowers they had to default to be eligible for HAMP. The only bit of good news is there is a LPS investigation underway, but it has been ongoing since 2009. Funny how Catherine Masto in the comparatively small Nevada attorney general’s office has made more progress from an at the earliest October 2010 start date.

And we still have the banking industry repeating its mantra: everyone who lost his home was delinquent. Yes, in a kangaroo court, the accused will always lose. But the Washington Post runs this sort of propaganda in a woefully ignorant op-ed arguing in favor of the less than 50 state attorney general settlement, based on the false premises that a deal will lead to meaningful principal mods and that the lack of a deal (as opposed to pervasive abuses that are also keeping investors away from private label paper) is the source of the dreaded “uncertainty” and hence must be eliminated. (Adam Levitin has already admirably dispatched the reasoning, such as it is, that underlies this op ed, which is a rehash of tired arguments).

Notice the Reuters article doesn’t even get to frauds on investors: double dipping (charing both investors and borrowers for the same fee), misrepresentations to investors (false certifications by trustees and servicers that they held the collateral in good order, Section 11 Securities Act by making representations about loan quality when they never reviewed the loans), and other abuses (such as reporting foreclosed properties being sold months after the fact to allow them to collect additional servicing fees).