"Fake Chinese income" mortgages fuel Toronto real estate bubble: HSBC bank leaks

IANAFinancialInvestigator, but skimming through it sounds like:

1. Fraudulent applicants come to the bank with crazy stories to ask for enormous loans/mortgages toward a Toronto house, allegedly to turn hyper-suspicious big piles of cash into a more reputable-looking asset.

2. HSBC goes along with that because they want to suckle on the sweet regular payments of suspicious cash, even though they ought to damn well know that these customers are just a front for an organized crime ring.

3. As a bonus, this locally-concentrated money-laundering/speculative-investment thing screws up the property market for Torontonians. The local multimillionaire babysitter is willing to buy at almost any price because their secret financial goals are very different than yours.

While looking for other articles, I notice it's been ~16 months after the end of HSBC 10-year tangle with US regulators over their business with Mexican and Columbian drug cartels. [0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-fed-terminates-e...

Approximately anyone can buy a US-based REIT, even if they're ineligible to enter the country.

> But more than a year later, D.M. was so dissatisfied with the bank’s response that

I only recognize the HSBC name from scandals in the news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Controversies

> making him a minority among mostly Chinese-Canadian co-workers at the Aurora branch.

Not trying to point fingers on whether the branch workers were in on the whole thing, but maybe it was easier to perpetuate the fraud because of cultural familiarity?

HSBC soon to be RBC. This is not very surprising, a lot of this also gets facilitated by the independent mortgage brokers who get ppl through the system with some 'creative coaching'.