I've blogged and written extensively about United First Financial's product, the Money Merge Account. (Yes, that's the pay-off-your-home-years-sooner program that sells for $3500.) The article that was the most fun to write was for American Chronicle, because I analyzed the factors that contribute to people's absolute belief in the scamminess of UFF and the MMA. In fact, Googling "United First Financial scam" (without the quotation marks) just now turned up 296,000 links. The same search, replacing UFF with "money merge account" (without the quotes) yields 1,220,000 links,

The purpose of today's rant is not to explain, again, why people are suspicious of the MMA (money merge account) offered by U-First. It is enough to simply show you the size of the obsession. (In fairness, part of the buzz must be attributed to the enthusiastic army of commissioned representatives. I confess this only because I'm aware how many copies of my program Let your Mortgage Make You Rich! go out when people are looking for the truth about United First Financial.)

My point is that while millions of lines of cyberink are spilled belittling one company that offers solutions to people who want to pay off their homes in about a third the time (similar help to that provided in Let Your Mortgage Make You Rich! for $3400 less), the average person doesn't seem to have a clue about how far-reaching white collar crime has been in the current global economic crisis.

Some amusing search numbers:
953,000 English pages for mortgage crisis
293,000 English pages for wall street fraud

Anthony Accetta, a formerly highly-placed attorney and present founder of a private investigation firm specializing in "due diligence in financial matters" wrote brilliantly in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, a guest commentary called "Wall Street: crimes or misdemeanors?" He said:

There has been no suggestion that Wall Street banks, themselves, will be criminally or civilly prosecuted for creating, maintaining, exploiting, and facilitating fraud in the derivative mortgage markets.

What? No hint of prosecutions on Wall Street?

That's my point folks. Lots of blabber about whether or not certain fancy software helps people pay off their homes faster, or can they do it on their own just as well, or does the technique not work at all? Very little - make that no - discussion about throwing the mortgage fiasco criminals into prison. Martha Stewart went to jail for an alleged action that saved her a $51,000 portfolio loss.

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Accetta continued…

There has been criminal conduct at every stage of the mortgage business, and there is ample proof that virtually every major investment bank in the mortgage securitization business initiated fraud, or through conscious avoidance or reckless disregard of facts known to them, enabled, aided and abetted fraud.

Is the scandal too big to prosecute? Stewart's was certainly small and manageable. Regarding Stewart's verdict:

One of the jurors said, "This is a victory for the little guys. No one is above the law."

Really? We'll see about that, won't we? My bet is the government will continue to work on a big enough bailout to keep favored economic sectors (and friends of sectors) afloat, but most of the people hurt will be those who are least able to afford it.

I'll close with a poetic quote from Accetta's Wall Street Journal guest column:

The so-called sub-prime mortgage crisis was predictable and predicted, preventable, but not prevented. Greed, arrogance, criminal conduct, negligence, and fraud threaten to go unpunished.