How to Find and Verify Your Mortgage Lender

Before you hand over your Social Security number, your tax returns, and your bank statements to someone who says they can get you a mortgage, you should probably make sure they're actually allowed to do that. It sounds obvious. But every year, thousands of buyers get burned by unlicensed operators, outright scams, or lenders who technically have a license but have a trail of complaints and enforcement actions behind them.

The good news is that verifying a mortgage lender or loan officer takes about two minutes. The bad news is that almost nobody does it. Let's fix that.

Why Verifying Your Lender Matters

When you apply for a mortgage, you are handing over the most sensitive financial information you have. Your income, your debts, your assets, your Social Security number. If the person on the other end of that transaction is not who they say they are, the consequences range from identity theft to losing your earnest money to getting locked into predatory loan terms that cost you tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the loan.

Mortgage fraud is not some edge case that only happens to careless people. The FBI consistently ranks mortgage fraud among the most common types of financial fraud in the United States. And it does not always look like a Nigerian prince email. Sometimes it looks like a polished website, a professional phone manner, and a rate that seems just a little too good to pass up.