Whatever happened to the subprime loan peddlers of the housing boom? Depends on where they were in the food chain, according to Marketplace.
At the bottom, those who spent their days in dark rooms cold-calling homeowners tended to be criminals even before they started selling subprime loans, the news outlet said.
“One of the disturbing things we found is that a large number of the people that work in these places are probationers, parolees, very low-paid people that are essentially just picked out of Craigslist ads,” Elizabeth Henderson, head of the real estate fraud unit of the district attorney’s office in Orange County, Calif., told Marketplace.
After the housing bubble burst and these people lost their jobs, some of them “morphed” into loan modification mills, Henderson said.
And the higher-ups packaging and selling the fraudulent loans?
“The answer to that is that overwhelmingly they are simply where they were before except they are much wealthier,” William Black, a former bank regulator and expert in white-collar crime, told Marketplace.
Source: Marketplace
