California West Communities opened four new communities in North County San Diego with homes priced from the $400,000s to the $800,000s. With buyers lined up, sixty homes quickly sold and went into escrow with no evidence that the buyers are experiencing problems getting loans. Good news indeed .
You can find out more about these communities at californiawestcommunities.com.
This is the third post of six written in an article by George Mantor. If you are a homeowner who might soon be facing default or you are currently in default and trying to work out something with your lender, this is critical information for you to know.
Predatory Mortgage Servicing Fraud – First of a SeriesRISMEDIA, April 6, 2010—
“Servicing, the collecting and distributing of mortgage payments, is the land of opportunity.
Who is in a better position to exploit a defaulting borrower than a person posing as someone who wants to help? And, it’s all part of a scam planned well in advance.
All the moves are choreographed to stymie, befuddle, and eventually beat down the homeowner until they give up in despair. Thirty states allow foreclosures to occur without any judicial review or any examination of the circumstances, the evidence or the veracity.
They comb credit reports looking for changes in the patterns of payments. If they see more use of credit cards, late payments, grocery charges, types of stores and purchases; there antennas go up and they smell a victim in the making. If they suspect you might be running low on cash, they know that you can’t put up much of a fight, particularly in a non judicial foreclosure state.
Do not believe that they exist simply to process checks, but rather to put the borrower over a barrel and then offer more and more expensive “solutions.” True, they don’t want your house, but they do want to keep you in default and every spare dime you can fork over. They don’t care one way or the other what happens to your home; they’re just the servicing company.”
More posts to come…..
This is the second post of six written in an article by George Mantor. If you are a homeowner who might soon be facing default or you are currently in default and trying to work out something with your lender, this is critical information for you to know.
Predatory Mortgage Servicing Fraud – First of a SeriesRISMEDIA, April 6, 2010—
“The financial intermediary who had no actual loss also bought credit default swaps for themselves at multiple times the loan amount.
There is an inherent conflict of interest in this scenario. The financial intermediaries, who actually have no risk, stand to gain enormously by collecting on the default swaps.
As if debt securitization and betting on failure weren’t lucrative enough, part of the plan included gaining every possible means of getting more of the borrower’s money in fees.
But even more important, by controlling servicing, they have the ability to actually control the exact number of defaults within specific pools by simply pushing people into default.
The terms of the default swaps were dictated by the financial intermediaries.
To collect on the default swaps, which the financial intermediaries created and designed, just like the onerous terms of your mortgage, only a certain percentage of defaults need to occur within a pool.
However, if they could control the performance of the underlying loans, they could manipulate the defaults in the pool. The best way to do that is to service the loan.
In addition to putting borrowers into default at will, they make vast untold sums of money before the property is foreclosed.
And once they target you, they cannot be stopped. That unlocks a wealth of money-making opportunities. The real money, as many servicing companies are discovering, is in the very lucrative business of targeting the most vulnerable borrowers and squeezing every last penny out of them before throwing them out in the street.”
More posts to come……
This is the sixth post of six from an article written by George Mantor. If you are a homeowner who might soon be facing default or you are currently in default and trying to work out something with your lender, this is critical information for you to know.
Predatory Mortgage Servicing Fraud – First of a SeriesRISMEDIA, April 6, 2010—
“Right now all of the focus is on the predatory loan-makers, not the loan servicers. There isn’t any help coming from lawmakers. Therefore, you need to protect yourselves.
1. Start to make your mortgage payment early. This should help keep you under the radar screen. Once someone targets you, they will be calling.
2. Don’t allow your homeowner’s insurance policy to lapse. If the mortgage servicer asks for proof of insurance, provide it through every channel available and document it. Print out and keep email, keep the fax verification and send every piece of mail “return receipt requested.” And, make sure they know you are doing it. Make the email confirmation part of your fax, for example. This sends a message that you might not be the easiest of targets.
3. Never talk to them on the phone. Make them put everything in writing.
4. Do not permit any sort of electronic transfer of funds; you want a paper trail. Buy and use check writing software that allows you to update your bank account online and regularly monitor check clearing activity.
5. Never sign anything without a professional review. Forbearance agreements aren’t for you, they are written by the servicer and designed to strip you of your rights and every last penny.
6. Consider paying any late fees and contesting them after the fact. Withholding payment from the mortgage servicer in a dispute will give them just the excuse they need to deduct it from your next payment leaving you in arrears on your mortgage payment and late every month thereafter. The late fees will skyrocket as your credit plummets leaving you no way out.”
Follow up articles to come.
This is the first post of six from an article written by George Mantor. If you are a homeowner who might soon be facing default or you are currently in default and trying to work out something with your lender, this is critical information for you to know.
Predatory Mortgage Servicing Fraud – First of a SeriesRISMEDIA, April 6, 2010—
“It’s been more than three years since I wrote an article about mortgage servicing fraud. I’m a little older, but it’s still alive and thriving. Since then, we’ve had a complete meltdown of our financial system, a thorough looting of the American tax payer, the destruction of the middle class, and just about every other indicator of quality of life has tanked alarmingly.
At the same time, financial intermediaries were able to reap huge profits, receive TARP funds to which they were not entitled and didn’t need because they had no real losses, and funneled it all into bonuses that catapulted number crunchers to oil Sheikdom wealth.
This didn’t happen by circumstance, but is instead part of a large and well-organized fraud wherein all of the evidence points directly back to “too big to fail institutions” that are, apparently, too big to prosecute as well.
Financial intermediaries targeted the large pools of cash in pension and hedge funds. They promised absolute safety for a slightly higher interest rate than comparably safe investments.
They pointed out that residential mortgage foreclosures were extremely rare at between 1-2%.
They failed to mention that those were just foreclosures. Default rates are something different. Nor did they mention their plan to create a menu of guaranteed to default loans—predatory loans.
And, they left out the part about how easy it would be to increase defaults if one controlled the servicing. At present, there are a record 13-plus percent of loans which are not current. Coincidence?”
More to follow in coming posts…..