NEW YORK — A community bank and 19 ex-employees have been criminally charged with issuing hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent mortgages that ended up in unwitting investors' portfolios, prosecutors said Thursday in announcing a rare indictment of a bank in the mortgage meltdown that rocked the U.S. economy.

Abacus Federal Savings Bank was hit with mortgage fraud, grand larceny and other charges in what Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. called "a systematic scheme to falsify and fabricate mortgage applications" so that unqualified borrowers could get loans. The loans later were sold to mortgage giant Fannie Mae, which repackaged them into securities for investors.

Abacus, a Chinatown-based bank with mainly immigrant customers and branches in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, said it had investigated and reported the problems and would vigorously defend itself.

read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/31/abacus-bank-mortgage-fraud_n_1559460.html [2]