REFinBlog

Editor: David Reiss
Brooklyn Law School

October 3, 2013

Washington Court Rejects Plaintiff’s Claims That MERS’ Assignment was Fraudulent

By Ebube Okoli

The Washington court in Bain v. Metropolitan Mortgage Group, Inc., 2010WL891585 (W.D. Wash. Dist. Ct., March2010), rejected the plaintiff’s contentions that an assignment by MERS was executed fraudulently.

The plaintiff based his claims around the execution of a mortgage assignment by a person designated as an officer of MERS, but who was not also a MERS employee.

The court, in rejecting the plaintiff’s arguments that the assignment was executed fraudulently, noted that the non-employee signors did not commit an affirmative misrepresentation of fact, because of the fact that, for purposes of signing the papers, the non-employee signors misrepresented nothing: [the IndyMac signor] and [the MERS signor] did bear the titles that they used. The employees’ use of the titles was expressly authorized by contracts with IndyMac and MERS.

Thus there was nothing deceptive about using an agent to execute a document, and the court also noted that such practice is commonplace in deed of trust actions.

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