Multnomah County is suing a rogue’s gallery of the largest mortgage players including B of A, Wells Fargo, Oregon’s Bank of the Cascades, Chase, Citi, and West Coast Bank for nearly forty million dollars.

The focus of the lawsuit The suit focuses on the mortgage-backed securities system that nearly wrecked the lives of families across Oregon in the later part of the last decade. In essence, the County is going after Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS., the property records system that enabled the rapid, complex transactions involving these bundled mortgages, and the banks that cut

The county is arguing that MERS wrecked the public property records system while simultaneously helping mortgage lenders evade transaction fees. Consequently, Multnomah County is suing MERS and 18 co-defendants for misrepresentation, negligence and unjust enrichment, alleging that MERS was fraudulently listed as the lender in a flood of transactions that littered the county’s public records with false records.” Multnomah county is also seeking three-fold repayment of multiple $30 transaction fees avoided through the use of MERS.