Bank of America Paid Bonuses to Foreclose: Lawsuit
Bank of America routinely denied qualified borrowers a chance to modify their loans to more affordable terms and paid cash bonuses to bank staffers for pushing homeowners into foreclosure, according to affidavits filed last week in a Massachusetts lawsuit.
"We were told to lie to customers," said Simone Gordon, who worked in the bank's loss mitigation department until February 2012. "Site leaders regularly told us that the more we delayed the HAMP [loan] modification process, the more fees Bank of America would collect."
In sworn testimony, six former employees describe what they saw behind the scenes of an often opaque process that has frustrated homeowners, their attorneys and housing counselors.
They describe systematic efforts to undermine the program by routinely denying loan modifications to qualified applicants, withholding reviews of completed applications, steering applicants to costlier "in-house" loans and paying bonuses to employees based on the number of new foreclosures they initiated.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100818866
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Like CitiGroup.
My wife and I had a runaround with Citi a few years ago (Citi wasn't our choice of lenders; it purchased our mortgage company a few years before). Our trouble wasn't nearly as bad as the OP article, but enough to be really annoying. We finally got Citi off our backs, but I wonder now if it was committing fraud.
From Mother Jones, 2010--"How Banks Got Too Big to Fail"
