Big banks: Foreclosure probes carry financial risk

I don't expect any real action(s) on any of this either, but we can always dream about it, huh? LOL! Most Americans KNOW who's guilty of what regardless, probably why none of those CEOs are hardly ever seen in public & ride around behind bulletproof glass. They'll all get their just due, eventually one way or another.

"They'll all get their just due, eventually one way or another."

Well we need to get started, because they are awfully close to being unstoppable at this point.

The worst gangster of all is JP Morgan Chase. These guys are really playing all the tricks. I had to deal with them recently on behave of my mother, an 83 yo uneducated widow who still thinks she can take care of the bills.

She was slapped with a "flood insurance" placed by the bank of $417 a month, because the association failed to include flood insurance. She lives in a 4th floor condo association unit which has an “umbrella” insurance for all of the properties. The fact of the matter is that FEMA revised the flood maps and excluded the area from flood on Feb 2010.

My mother, out of ignorance, never read the letters and statements and continued sending the usual amount ($107.17 a month) and when I found out what was happening they had the apartment in foreclosure.

We are talking of a property worth today after the crash over $70,000 with a mortgage of less than $14,000 at 4-5/8% interest. On top of that, my mother wrote a check back in September for 117.17 and her checking bank paid it for $777.77. Her handwriting is terrible and the bank read the numbers but not the words on the check and paid it as 777.77. She never realized this until I told her.

So, in 5 month she paid the equivalent of 11 month of payments, which Chase placed as payment for the insurance that she never needed.

Finally she called me in January to tell me something was wrong with Chase as she was getting letters and calls from them on a daily basis. I took me over 6 hours to figure out what was happening; including the check that was paid for 777.77 instead of 117.17 (she always included an extra $10 to lower the principal).

When I called Chase the call was transferred automatically to their “foreclosure department” without any other option. These people deal as a typical harassing collection agency.

To make this story shorter, after several calls and explanations they agreed to return the insurance money back to her escrow account, but since the account was in “foreclosure” they could not use the escrow money to credit to the “past due” amount. I was told to send a bank check for $909 in order to release the account from foreclosure, so that they could run another escrow analysis and that only then they could send a check back with the overpayment. Can you believe this?

Well, I send the $909 by express mail on Feb. 4 with a letter to run the analysis again. Not a word from them since and today I called again and the account was released from foreclosure. My guess is that is going to take a lot more time to receive the overpayment and in the mean time they are playing with her money.

In this process I learned that once the loan it’s 3 month late (which in real life is 2, as you are paying on the first of this month the due payment from last month) you have no option but to pay the full amount that the foreclosure department has and the account is locked to any adjustments by customer service. Be aware of this with your mortgage as many people don’t know this.

My alternative would have been to give the case to a lawyer, but in the end it would had been expensive than to send them more money.

I search for Chase Home Finance LLC (the limited liability corporation that Chase created to separate mortgages from other bank assets) and found two class action suits against them for this same problem.

They are playing hard with properties that have equity but take their time with the ones that they know are not worst even the loan amount. They are big time crooks with a license to steal.