Circuit Judge Susan Gardner of Pasco County has recently undertaken a much more thorough review of the pending foreclosure cases in her courtroom. This comes after many foreclosure mills have been accused of over-billing homeowners for serving notice of the foreclosure lawsuits. These fees for service of process are typically between $50 and $200. However, judges are regularly seeing charges from the foreclosure mills of more than $1,000. In some cases these charges are being attributed to service on a person that does not even exist.
As part of her examination, Judge Gardner randomly selected twelve cases for review. Of the twelve cases, eleven of them had what appeared to be inflated charges for service of process. Additionally, she has begun to see a trend that the lawyers signing the affidavits attesting to the reasonableness of the fees are signing their names and bar numbers in a manner which make them impossible to decipher.
She has ordered five lawyers from various foreclosure mills appear before her in court to explain the fees and their illegible signatures. Judge Gardner recently made the following statement, "I don't want to throw anybody in jail, but I'm getting really angry, and I'm not going to tolerate it anymore. I want some answers. This stuff isn't going through on my watch."
