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The proposed attorneys generals' settlement of mortgage servicing practices threatens a high-margin business that brings in hundreds of millions of dollars every year for servicers.
March 10 -
Two force-placed insurance tales — one funny, one not, neither flattering to banks; Freddie Mac wants higher down payments; and more.
March 2 -
Most forced-place homeowners policies are only in effect for several months because people have an incentive to go and get a regular policy after that. And most do.
November 10 -
Assurant Group defended its force-placed insurance business practices and relationships with mortgage servicers Wednesday, as its stock fell 11%.
November 10 - PH
Before servicers force-place insurance, they often warn homeowners that the policy is costly, offers poor coverage and is likely to benefit the servicer. The investors who often end up paying for that same policy don't benefit from the same notice.
November 9 -
Bank of America and Balboa may have had an opportunity to misuse the force-placed mortgage product. If this happened, this is a case of bad actors doing bad things.
November 10 -
Evidence of abuses and self-dealing in force-placed insurance suggests there may be far larger problems in how servicers are handling home loans than sloppy document recording.
November 9
The online hacker group Anonymous has released
The documents include images of e-mails between employees of Balboa Insurance, a provider of force-placed insurance that B of A sold recently to QBE Group of Australia. Bank of America inherited Balboa from its 2008 takeover of Countrywide Financial Corp.
In the e-mails, employees discuss removing loan numbers from an insurance tracking system.
In one e-mail, a Balboa employee wrote that it "cannot remove the [Document Tracking Numbers] from" the tracking system but "can remove loan numbers, so the documents will not show as matched to those loans."
A B of A spokesman said by e-mail Monday morning that the company is "aware that a former Balboa Insurance Group employee is trying to generate interest in non-foreclosure related clerical and administrative documents that he stole from the company."
"We are confident that his extravagant assertions are untrue," the spokesman wrote.
The emails are apparently unrelated to the trove of internal B of A files that WikiLeaks has
"If anyone can get me a copy of … the hard drive that Julian Assagne reportedly has," the former Balboa employee wrote to Anonymous, "I could find all the dirt on that hard drive within a week."
The e-mails appear to deal with an unspecified error relating to several dozen GMAC loan files being processed by a Balboa office. In correspondence from late last year, one employee tells colleagues that the company can't erase loan certain document images from the Rembrandt Loan processing software that it uses. What can be done, another says, is to remove data linking the data to loan files, a process a senior employee approves.
According to an e-mail by the purported whistleblower, Jason Vaughn, stripping this information will leave a "huge red flag for auditors." Vaughn goes on to ask, "what am I missing? This just doesn't seem right to me."
The published e-mails, even with an attempted explication, do not appear to give a clear sense of the original data's nature or import. But Vaughn's correspondence with the person who released it makes clear that he regarded it as a "smoking gun." He also complains of alleged police and legal harassment and imputes that Bank of America would stop at nothing to silence its critics.
"I would rather spend a long boring life in court than end up disappearing and having my loved ones believe that I was a coward who went crazy and committed suicide," he writes.
