Who do I pay?

Nineteen months. That has how long it has been since I last made a house payment. Some would tell me to pay, and to those people, I ask one simple question: Who am I supposed to pay?

I signed a mortgage with a company we will call Mortgage Trust Company*, and paid on it for two and a half years. It turns out, the mortgage was sold by Mortgage Trust Company, to Fannie Mae just 4 months after I bought the house. Mortgage Trust Company was the servicer. The problem is, Mortgage Trust Company didn't tell anyone that it had been sold. Actually, not only did they fail to tell anyone, they even testified in court, producing (faked, forged) documentation to say that they still owned the note and mortgage. Fraud. Perjury. Forgery.

I sued them for that. They paid me a 5 figure settlement amount to keep that out of court.

Then, it turned out that Mortgage Trust Company had actually sold the note and mortgage twice. Not only to Fannie Mae, but to Nationstar mortgage. I don't know how that was legal, since the note and mortgage had already been sold to Fannie Mae, but Mortgage Trust Company hasn't seemed to care a whole lot about the truth.

There are now three different banks who claim to own my note and mortgage, but none of them can produce the original paperwork. Since the original note is a negotiable instrument much like an endorsed check, anyone wishing to foreclose must either produce the original, or be able to testify that the original was in their possession when it was lost or destroyed. Since no one can do that, I have thus far been in a free house.

Even if I had a desire to pay, or to turn the house over to the bank, which one do I compensate? This is why we are in the mess we are in now.

* Names have been changed to comply with the terms of a settlement agreement