Tag Archives: Foreclosure

January 8, 2013 · 9:17 AM

How foreclosure settlement affects borrowers

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Information some TFC readers may be able to use or pass on…

USA Today

Many details of the $8.5 billion mortgage foreclosure settlement that federal banking regulators announced Monday have not been finalized yet. Here are some answers for borrowers.

Q: How much money is in it?

A: Ten banks and mortgage companies will pay $3.3 billion in cash to borrowers and $5.2 billion in mortgage relief to settle federal regulators’ investigations into alleged foreclosure abuses. This settlement largely replaces a 2011 settlement between the same regulators and leading home loan servicers.

STORY: Ten banks settle foreclosure charges for $8.5 billion

Q: Who’s eligible for compensation?

A: That hasn’t changed. You’re eligible if your primary home was in some stage of foreclosure in 2009 or 2010 and your loan was handled by one of the participating servicers.

Q: If I think I’m eligible, what should I do now?

A: Nothing. If you’re eligible, regulators say you’ll be contacted by the end of March by a company that will function like a claims administrator.

Q: Must I prove that I was harmed?

A: Probably not. Your servicer will place your case in one of 11 categories representing different kinds of harm. Regulators will spot check those placements.

Q: What’s the purpose of that?

A: The categories will be used to decide how much you get. Servicers are supposed to place you in the category that would net you the highest payment, based on your case.

Everybody in the same category will get the same compensation. For bigger payouts, expected to be up to $125,000, “some verification” may be required, says OCC spokesman Bryan Hubbard. Few are likely to get that much.

Q: I asked for a review of my case under the 2011 settlement. What happens now?

A: About 495,000 people did that. If you did, you’ll likely get an extra, undetermined payment, regulators say.

Q: What if I didn’t suffer a foreclosure abuse?

A: You’ll still be paid. But it will may be a small amount.

Many details of the $8.5 billion mortgage foreclosure settlement that federal banking regulators announced Monday have not been finalized yet. Here are some answers for borrowers.

Q: What if I think I should get more than what I do?

A: No appeals allowed. You could still sue the servicer.

Q: How do I get a piece of the $5.2 billion in mortgage relief?

A: Servicers will decide that. The kind of help they provide will earn them different levels of credit toward meeting their obligations under the settlement. For instance, if they reduce your home loan balance, they’ll get $1 in credit for every dollar in debt forgiven, regulators say.

Other types of relief will not be dollar for dollar. Those formulas are still being worked out.

Q: How is this settlement different from the $25 billion national mortgage settlement reached last year?

A: Under that settlement, just five servicers are participating. They are Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, Ally/GMAC and Wells Fargo. They’re paying out $1.5 billion to borrowers who actually lost a home to foreclosure from 2008 through 2011 and meet other requirements. They’re also extending more money in mortgage relief. The settlements are more similar now in that actual errors won’t have to be discovered for borrowers to be compensated.

Q: Can servicers get credit for both programs by helping the same homeowner?

A: No, the OCC says.

Q: What if my servicer was part of the first settlement but not the new one?

A: Talks are continuing with them, the OCC says. If they never sign on, their old foreclosure reviews will continue. Those servicers are HSBC, Ally (formerly GMAC), EverBank and IndyMac, part of OneWest Bank.

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October 29, 2011 · 10:06 PM

Costume Party At ‘Foreclosure Mill’ Law Firm Mocked Those Who Lost Homes

This is simply outrageous!

I’m just glad these creeps were exposed for their callousness and sheer apathy toward the foreclosure mess that they no doubt, helped facilitate…

The New York Times

On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party.The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

The party is the firm’s big annual bash. Employees wear Halloween costumes to the office, where they party until around noon, and then return to work, still in costume. I can’t tell you how people dressed for this year’s party, but I can tell you about last year’s.

That’s because a former employee of Steven J. Baum recently sent me snapshots of last year’s party. In an e-mail, she said that she wanted me to see them because they showed an appalling lack of compassion toward the homeowners — invariably poor and down on their luck — that the Baum firm had brought foreclosure proceedings against.

When we spoke later, she added that the snapshots are an accurate representation of the firm’s mind-set. “There is this really cavalier attitude,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that people are going to lose their homes.” Nor does the firm try to help people get mortgage modifications; the pressure, always, is to foreclose. I told her I wanted to post the photos on The Times’s Web site so that readers could see them. She agreed, but asked to remain anonymous because she said she fears retaliation.

Let me describe a few of the photos. In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.

A second picture shows a coffin with a picture of a woman whose eyes have been cut out. A sign on the coffin reads: “Rest in Peace. Crazy Susie.” The reference is to Susan Chana Lask, a lawyer who had filed a class-action suit against Steven J. Baum — and had posteda YouTube video denouncing the firm’s foreclosure practices. “She was a thorn in their side,” said my source.

 

Continue reading here…

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December 4, 2010 · 8:55 PM

Law Firm Accused Of Using Non-Lawyers In Foreclosure Filings, Charging Homeowners Attorney Fees

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Crooks & Liars

It seems that our legal system, already heavily weighted in favor of the powerful, is completely out of control when it comes to these mortgage foreclosures. As Matt Taibbi recently pointed out, judges handling foreclosure cases give kneejerk credence to the attorneys, to the point where they can’t even be bothered to check the filings to make sure they’re in order. It took a bankruptcy judge to call this law firm to task.

Now, defrauding the homeowners is probably perfectly okay with the establishment. But I find it hard to believe they’ll get away with impersonating lawyers!

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A Philadelphia law firm used nonlawyers to file untold numbers of mortgage foreclosures across the state and fraudulently collected attorney’s fees that caused people to lose their homes in cases which should be legally nullified, a Pittsburgh lawyer claims in a lawsuit.

The lawsuit comes as a bankruptcy court judge, also in Pittsburgh, has given the same firm, Goldbeck, McCafferty & McKeever, until the end of business Friday to self-report to the Disciplinary Board of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Thomas Agresti filed two opinions castigating the firm and the lender it represented, Countrywide Home Loans, in a foreclosure that led a Pittsburgh-area woman to file for bankruptcy in 2001.

The judge determined a Goldbeck attorney knowingly gave the court phony lender documents to bolster its foreclosure claim saying “the evidence that (the attorney) lied was considerable.”

Attorneys at the Goldbeck firm have not returned calls for comment from The Associated Press on Judge Agresti’s findings or the 78-page lawsuit filed last month by Patrick Loughren.

Loughren told The Associated Press he could not comment on his lawsuit, but said the document made clear his reason for filing it.

The lawsuit spells out two broad goals: defending the legal profession, and pursuing a remedy for those facing foreclosure and those who have already paid attorneys fees or lost their homes in actions filed by the Philadelphia firm.

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November 22, 2010 · 12:51 AM

Think you’ve read the worst about foreclosures? Read this

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McClatchy

MIAMI — All she wanted was $50,000 from the equity in her house to help pay the bills while looking for a job in nursing. What Imogene Hall got was a brutal lesson in the sometimes shady ways of the mortgage industry.

It’s a lesson learned by untold numbers of homeowners in Florida, epicenter of the foreclosure crisis gripping the nation.

“Everywhere I turn, someone else is scamming me,” said Hall, a 49-year-old Jamaican immigrant who stands to lose her Miami Gardens home the Monday after Thanksgiving. “All I do is work hard, and I get surrounded by thieves.”

A review of court records found evidence of misconduct at nearly every stage of Hall’s experience. Consider:

_ Johnson Cuffy, a former mortgage broker now serving an 11-year prison sentence for grand theft, handled Hall’s refinancing in early 2006, using a strategy a state investigator described as “outright mortgage fraud.” He faces up to 30 more years in prison if convicted of 16 other mortgage fraud charges he’s facing.

_ The title agent who signed the crucial deed transfers that Hall’s fraud claim rests on operated an unlicensed title company that stole more than $1.5 million from South Florida home buyers during closing proceedings between 2005 and 2007, according to Florida Supreme Court records.

_ A man who listed his employer as a nonexistent Blockbuster Video store in New York somehow used Hall’s home as collateral to secure a $230,000 loan from subprime lender Argent Mortgage.

_ Hall’s foreclosure was processed by the Florida Default Law Group, one of four Florida law firms being investigated by the state attorney general for using flawed documents to repossess homes from thousands of owners.

Read more…

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October 25, 2010 · 2:37 AM

Foreclosure Fairy Dust

Is Bank of America a miracle worker? (Not.)

Slate

Did Bank of America really review 102,000 foreclosures in two and a half weeks? Yeah, right.

On Oct. 1 Bank of America said it would temporarily halt foreclosures in the 23 states where foreclosures require a court proceeding so that it might review the seizures in light of reports about industry-wide irregularities. (See my previous column, “Ask George Bailey.”) The bank pledged to “amend all affidavits in foreclosure cases that have not yet gone to judgment.”

Seventeen days later, the bank said it had completed its review in these 23 states and would resume foreclosures starting Oct. 25. (It will continue the review it began Oct. 8 of the remaining 27 states where foreclosures do not require a court proceeding—and where the likelihood that anyone will care about fake notarizations, missing documents, and the like is therefore more remote.) In effect, the bank said on Oct. 18 that it had reviewed 102,000 foreclosures, figured out whatever may have been wrong with them, and was ready to get back to the business of seizing and selling off these delinquent properties.

The foreclosure crisis was brought on by bluffing and corner-cutting banks (or foreclosure mills subcontracting for those banks) that had too many defaults to process at once. Might a similar bluffing and corner-cutting be the hallmark of Bank of America’s Evelyn Wood-style review? One can’t be certain, but three clues suggest the answer is “yes.”

Continue reading bullet points…

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October 12, 2010 · 12:36 AM

40 States Join to Halt Foreclosures

Wallstreet Journal

Attorneys General Hope Lenders Will Re-Write Loans With Troubled Documents

A coalition of as many as 40 state attorneys general is expected Wednesday to announce an investigation into the mortgage-servicing industry, an effort some of them hope will pressure financial institutions to rewrite large numbers of troubled loans.

The move comes amid recent allegations that mortgage-servicers, which include units of major banks such as Bank of America Corp., submitted fraudulent documents in thousands of foreclosure proceedings nationwide.

The banks say the document problems are technical—largely the result of papers approved by so-called robo-signers with little review—and don’t reflect substantive problems with foreclosures. Still, they have drawn criticism from consumer advocates and state and federal lawmakers.

“I think the mortgage-servicing firms need to understand that they face real exposure now, and they would be well advised to take this very seriously, to clean this up by doing loan workouts to keep people in their homes, which up till now they’ve just paid lip-service to,” said Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray.      Continue reading…

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October 9, 2010 · 8:13 PM

In California: 10,000 LINE UP TO SAVE THEIR HOMES!

 

Sacramento Bee

They came by the thousands, transforming normally festive Cal Expo into a venue emblematic of California’s nightmarish housing meltdown.

An estimated 10,000 people were in line Friday morning when the Cal Expo Pavilion’s doors opened on a five-day event aimed at helping distressed homeowners avoid foreclosure.

The line for the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America’s “Save the Dream” event stretched from the Pavilion, through Cal Expo’s east parking lot, onto Exposition Boulevard and nearly to Ethan Way – a distance of half a mile.

Sacramento-area homeowners stood shoulder to shoulder with those from all parts of California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Arizona and far beyond, hoping to have their mortgage payments lowered in order to keep their homes.

Their stories ran the gamut: underwater mortgages, unemployment, financial crises, long-missed loan payments and frustration trying to talk with lenders.

NACA officials this week wrapped up a six-day event at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where an estimated 40,000 came through the doors.

NACA CEO Bruce Marks said Friday that he expects that many at Cal Expo by closing time Tuesday.

“You’d think that the crowds would diminish by now, but they’re not. They keep coming,” Marks said. “This (Sacramento event) is probably going to have about as many as we had in Los Angeles.”

NACA, headquartered in the Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain, will be working with homeowners around the clock through 8 p.m. Tuesday.

Its services are free, and it serves both the employed and unemployed. Options include renegotiated loans, interest rate reductions, loan principal reductions and mortgage restructuring. NACA said it has legally binding contracts with major lenders, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/10/09/3091190/10000-wait-in-line-at-cal-expo.html#ixzz11uTuhBNd

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September 22, 2010 · 2:46 PM

Mortgage Giants Didn’t Even Read Paperwork, Foreclosures Now On Hold In 23 States

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This is totally outrageous…

The Washington Post

Some of the nation’s largest mortgage companies used a single document processor who said he signed off on foreclosures without having read the paperwork – an admission that may open the door for homeowners across the country to challenge foreclosure proceedings.

The legal predicament compelled Ally Financial, the nation’s fourth-largest home lender, to halt evictions of homeowners in 23 states this week. Now it appears hundreds of other companies, including mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, may also be affected because they use Ally to service their loans.

As head of Ally’s foreclosure document processing team, 41-year-old Jeffrey Stephan was required to review cases to make sure the proceedings were legally justified and the information was accurate. He was also required to sign the documents in the presence of a notary.

In a sworn deposition, he testified that he did neither.

The reason may be the sheer volume of the documents he had to hand-sign: 10,000 a month. Stephan had been at that job for five years.

How the nation’s foreclosure system became reliant on the tedious work of a few corporate bureaucrats is still a matter that mortgage lenders are trying to answer. While the lenders may have had legitimate cause to foreclose, the mishandling of the paperwork has given homeowners ammunition in their fight against foreclosure and has drawn the attention of state law enforcement officials.

Ally spokesman James Olecki called the problem with the documents “an important but technical defect.” He said the papers were “factually accurate” but conceded that “corrective action” may have to be taken in some cases and that others may “require court intervention.”  Continue reading…

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