Wall Street Journal reporters examine the mortgages beneath the Abacus deals.

Nice mix here of foreclosure stories, from a guy who got hit by a truck and a Romanian immigrant who got scammed by a predatory lender, to a woman in California's Inland Empire who worked as a nursing-home assistant and also somehow allegedly ran a daycare operation grossing $9,000 per month. "[S]he says she was having a hard time making the $5,000 monthly payments on her existing $688,000 mortgage, which carried an initial interest rate of 9.05%," the newspaper reports:

Nonetheless, she took out an even bigger loan from Fremont, which lent her $786,250 at an initial interest rate of 7.55%—but that would begin to float as high as 13.55% two years later. She says the monthly payment on the new loan came to a bit more than $5,000.

She defaulted in early 2008 and was evicted from the house in early 2009.

Perhaps the WSJ reporters should have confirmed her $9,000-per-month income claim, but then again, we don't expect them to investigate the Easter Bunny every year.

The Denver deal is the real doozy.

Again, I say, the fraud at the bottom is a huge contributing factor to the crisis. We need to shut down this nation's land-scam industry before it kills again.

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