It has been reported that the UK’s financial services regulator, the Financial Services Authority, has banned a mortgage broker. The ban was imposed because the broker allegedly failed to prevent mortgage fraud.
The London based mortgage broker was accused of negligence in failing to prevent fraud and incompetence. The FSA said that Kevin Byrne, who was working at Forest Financial, did not have the competence of integrity to stop mortgage fraudsters from targeting the business.
According to the FSA mortgage referrals were accepted by Byrne from third parties. However, he simply accepted these referrals without bothering to verify or check the information on them.
This resulted in him submitting seven applications that contained false and misleading information and in the case of one application that was submitted the person on the application did not even exist.
The FSA has been cracking down on mortgage fraud over the past couple of years, and in particular since its mortgage review last year it has been clamping down on this type of activity. Already a number of mortgage related firms and brokers have been fined or banned by the FSA for mortgage related fraud.
In the case of Forest Financial, Mr Byrne was not only found to have been incompetent and lacking in diligence with regards to the applications that he submitted, but also found to have certified a number of supporting documents that were sent in with the applications without carrying out any of the necessary checks.
An official from the FSA stated: “This made him an easy target for the introducer to obtain mortgage advances from lenders on a fraudulent basis, which could have been prevented if Forest Financial had put in place basic financial crime checks.”
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