Bank of America agrees to record $17bn settlement over mortgage fraud
23 replies, posted
[url]http://rt.com/business/181724-bank-of-america-17-billion/[/url]
[IMG]http://cdn.rt.com/files/news/2c/5d/c0/00/bank-of-america.si.jpg[/IMG]
[QUOTE]America’s second largest lender has reached a $16.65 billion settlement with US federal authorities for selling toxic mortgages misleading investors, the Justice Department said Thursday.
“This historic resolution - the largest such settlement on record - goes far beyond ‘the cost of doing business,’” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement posted on the US Justice Department website on Thursday.
The bank will pay out $9.65 billion in cash and $7 billion for consumer relief – such as modified home loans and refinanced mortgages.
"Under the terms of this settlement, the bank has agreed to pay $7 billion in relief to struggling homeowners, borrowers, and communities affected by the bank’s conduct. This is appropriate given the size and scope of the wrongdoing at issue,” the statement says.
The bank has agreed to pay a $5 billion 'civil penalty' to settle claims under the Financial Institutions Reform and Recovery Enforcement Act (FIRREA), a federal law introduced after the loan crisis in the 1980s.
To date, President Obama's Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force and its Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities (RMBS) Working Group, have collected $36.65 billion from banks to redistribute to consumers and investors misled by the country's leading financial institutions.
The fine is the largest single compensation settlement, beating out JPMorgan Chase & Co’s $13 billion penalty paid in November 2013. Citigroup, another major US bank, had to pay $7 billion in July.[/QUOTE]
This is very good. It's about time the world of high finance got put in its place for overstepping itself.
obligatory:
[img]http://econintersect.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/bank-robbing-patrons.jpg[/img]
It's good that they're doing this, but somehow I get the feeling this isn't as much of a kick in the ass to the bank as it seems.
That's good, because there are STILL some financial institutions who haven't paid back their TARP/bailout money if my facts are straight. Fine the fuck out of all these crooked assholes.
[QUOTE=Mister Sandman;45760526]It's good that they're doing this, but somehow I get the feeling this isn't as much of a kick in the ass to the bank as it seems.[/QUOTE]
They need to be shut down completely. Fuck them. They stole peoples houses, including mine.
A lot more needs to happen than just a fine.
This fine is greater than their entire 2013 profits and will knock them into a loss for this quarter
"We royally fucked up the economy and cost millions their homes/jobs, but we're really gosh-darned sorry so surely this will be plenty of compensation for that. Enjoy!"
[QUOTE=Mister Sandman;45760526]It's good that they're doing this, but somehow I get the feeling this isn't as much of a kick in the ass to the bank as it seems.[/QUOTE]17 billion is a heck of a high number
[QUOTE=Badballer;45764431]17 billion is a heck of a high number[/QUOTE]
Apparently it's over one year's worth of net income for them.
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_America[/url]
The company is paying a settlement, but there hasn't been any individual criminal cases.
Uh, [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/y9VEbGf.png[/IMG] ?
[QUOTE=Adlertag1940;45764681]Uh, [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/y9VEbGf.png[/IMG] ?[/QUOTE]
This means that the total value of their assets has decreased since the previous financial year.
[QUOTE=Nacho Cheese;45764777]This means that the total value of their assets has decreased since the previous financial year.[/QUOTE]
more implied at the number
[QUOTE=Adlertag1940;45764803]more implied at the number[/QUOTE]
The total value of the company is insignificant, it's a business it still wants to make money every year and this fine means they'll be [i]losing[/i] money this year.
[QUOTE=Adlertag1940;45764803]more implied at the number[/QUOTE]
This is like saying the recession didn't hurt the US because the GDP was still high.
[QUOTE=Sir_takeslot;45764094]They need to be shut down completely. Fuck them. They stole peoples houses, including mine.
A lot more needs to happen than just a fine.[/QUOTE]
Please explain to me how they stole people's houses, why they need to be shut down and how shutting them down will help things.
[QUOTE=Sir_takeslot;45764094]They need to be shut down completely. Fuck them. They stole peoples houses, including mine.
A lot more needs to happen than just a fine.[/QUOTE]
Did your family default on their mortgage?
And this still won't change the fact that they're the worst bank in America
Who cares about banks? The guy in the picture in the OP apparently developed super speed, that's what we should be concerned with.
[QUOTE=sloppy_joes;45765242]Did your family default on their mortgage?[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Headhumpy;45765212]Please explain to me how they stole people's houses, why they need to be shut down and how shutting them down will help things.[/QUOTE]
No. They stopped taking our payments and sent them back to us without any given reason. Upon trying to contact them in the beginning they kept bouncing us between an office in California and an office in Texas. You'd call the California office, they'd put you on hold for an hour or two, talk to you, put you on hold again. Then talk to you and tell you that you need to call the Texas office. Then you'd have to call them, get put on hold again and wait before anyone would finally talk to you. Then, if you called the Texas office first, they'd tell you need to go to the office in California. It was an all day process on just trying to get a hold of them. They wouldn't tell us why over the phone they had stopped taking our payments, and said they had to send us paperwork explaining why, and of course the first three times they 'sent' it. It never arrived to our house. To finally get it, we had to call them and they had to ship it from the Texas office to the California office for some reason. They couldn't fax it, or they couldn't print it out there. They had to physically send it to that office, and my father had to go drive a few hours to actually pick it up from their offices and talk with them.
They claimed that we hadn't been making any payments to them and that put our house into foreclosure. Even though they had been sending them back to us, being called out on that they then informed us it was "earlier payments". Even though they had been taking our payments when they claimed we hadn't been paying them. My father had been smart enough to bring along bank statements and all of that. Once he pulled that out, they started back peddling pretty hard and "agreed to work with us." He ended up getting some paper-work to fill out so they'd start accepting our payments again. We filled it out and sent it back to them. Two weeks later, we hadn't heard anything back from them. Called them up again, and they told us that they had got it and the person who had talked to us was wrong and we had to send it to the Texas office. They didn't even bother to call us to fix their mistake. So they had to send the paper work back to us because they couldn't forward it to their other office. Then we had to send it to Texas. They eventually called is us up a few weeks later and said they had got it and they had been busy moving offices. It took us [b]months[/b] to get to this point, by the way, because how they kept bouncing us around.
They told us they placed us on a list and someone else would call us and resolve this. Of course, several weeks later and with us constantly harassing them to get some answers. We got a call up from the bank and they told us that our problem was cleared with them rejecting our payments. But, unfortunately, our house was still in foreclosure because of the payments THEY had refused. But that we could opt into a program that would delay the foreclosure and perhaps get us our house back... and of course, we had to pay for it. Which was about twice the amount we had been paying monthly for our house. While we could afford the 1,100 we had been paying originally, we couldn't afford the 2,000 dollar monthly payment. So we had to sell a lot of the stuff we had off, but we made all of the payments that they wanted. But in the end, they called us up and told us we had been dropped from the program and that we needed to get out of the house unless we wanted to make a 70,000 dollar payment. But at that point we had told them to go fuck themselves.
They manufactured a crisis and then delayed us until they could kick us out. We ended up tearing the house apart and taking every little piece we could in spite. We just got some settlement payments earlier this year from the entire fiasco, although it isn't even close to the amount of money we lost.
Bank of America has lied and fucked over a lot of people, being one of the people on the receiving end I'm pretty fucking bitter.
[url]http://cironline.org/reports/error-claims-cast-doubt-bank-america-foreclosures-bay-area-4412[/url]
[url]http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/11/feds-bank-of-america-illegally-foreclosed-on-active-service-members-homes/[/url]
[url]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/16/illegal-foreclosures_n_1283467.html[/url]
[url]http://www.propublica.org/article/bank-of-america-lied-to-homeowners-and-rewarded-foreclosures[/url]
[QUOTE]Five of the former Bank of America employees stated that they were encouraged to mislead customers. “We were told to lie to customers and claim that Bank of America had not received documents it had requested,” said Simone Gordon, who worked at the bank from 2007 until early 2012 as a senior collector. “We were told that admitting that the Bank received documents ‘would open a can of worms,’” she said, since the bank was required to underwrite applications within 30 days of receiving documents and didn’t have adequate staff. Wilson said each underwriter commonly had 400 outstanding applications awaiting review.
Anxious homeowners calling in for an update on their application were frequently told that their applications were “under review” when, in fact, nothing had been done in months, or the application had already been denied, four former employees said. [/QUOTE]
You can find this type of shit everywhere. Ask most of the people who've had their homes foreclosed on, and they'll tell you how they ran them around the block.
[QUOTE=Sir_takeslot;45765740]-story-[/QUOTE]
Alright, thanks for explaining. Sorry for my tone, I jumped to conclusions in that post. Are you sure you can't pursue further legal action, possibly find other homeowners who got fucked over like that and get a class action going?
In any case, I still believe the financial system as it is isn't completely broken. It needs further oversight and more proactive regulation but calling for it to be dismantled is probably a bit extreme.
[QUOTE=Sir_takeslot;45765740]-horror story-[/QUOTE]
Holy fuck... please tell me those settlement payments don't interfere with the possibility of filing a class action lawsuit.
[QUOTE=Sir_takeslot;45765740]No. They stopped taking our payments and sent them back to us without any given reason. Upon trying to contact them in the beginning they kept bouncing us between an office in California and an office in Texas. You'd call the California office, they'd put you on hold for an hour or two, talk to you, put you on hold again. Then talk to you and tell you that you need to call the Texas office. Then you'd have to call them, get put on hold again and wait before anyone would finally talk to you. Then, if you called the Texas office first, they'd tell you need to go to the office in California. It was an all day process on just trying to get a hold of them. They wouldn't tell us why over the phone they had stopped taking our payments, and said they had to send us paperwork explaining why, and of course the first three times they 'sent' it. It never arrived to our house. To finally get it, we had to call them and they had to ship it from the Texas office to the California office for some reason. They couldn't fax it, or they couldn't print it out there. They had to physically send it to that office, and my father had to go drive a few hours to actually pick it up from their offices and talk with them.
They claimed that we hadn't been making any payments to them and that put our house into foreclosure. Even though they had been sending them back to us, being called out on that they then informed us it was "earlier payments". Even though they had been taking our payments when they claimed we hadn't been paying them. My father had been smart enough to bring along bank statements and all of that. Once he pulled that out, they started back peddling pretty hard and "agreed to work with us." He ended up getting some paper-work to fill out so they'd start accepting our payments again. We filled it out and sent it back to them. Two weeks later, we hadn't heard anything back from them. Called them up again, and they told us that they had got it and the person who had talked to us was wrong and we had to send it to the Texas office. They didn't even bother to call us to fix their mistake. So they had to send the paper work back to us because they couldn't forward it to their other office. Then we had to send it to Texas. They eventually called is us up a few weeks later and said they had got it and they had been busy moving offices. It took us [b]months[/b] to get to this point, by the way, because how they kept bouncing us around.
They told us they placed us on a list and someone else would call us and resolve this. Of course, several weeks later and with us constantly harassing them to get some answers. We got a call up from the bank and they told us that our problem was cleared with them rejecting our payments. But, unfortunately, our house was still in foreclosure because of the payments THEY had refused. But that we could opt into a program that would delay the foreclosure and perhaps get us our house back... and of course, we had to pay for it. Which was about twice the amount we had been paying monthly for our house. While we could afford the 1,100 we had been paying originally, we couldn't afford the 2,000 dollar monthly payment. So we had to sell a lot of the stuff we had off, but we made all of the payments that they wanted. But in the end, they called us up and told us we had been dropped from the program and that we needed to get out of the house unless we wanted to make a 70,000 dollar payment. But at that point we had told them to go fuck themselves.
They manufactured a crisis and then delayed us until they could kick us out. We ended up tearing the house apart and taking every little piece we could in spite. We just got some settlement payments earlier this year from the entire fiasco, although it isn't even close to the amount of money we lost.
Bank of America has lied and fucked over a lot of people, being one of the people on the receiving end I'm pretty fucking bitter.
[url]http://cironline.org/reports/error-claims-cast-doubt-bank-america-foreclosures-bay-area-4412[/url]
[url]http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/11/feds-bank-of-america-illegally-foreclosed-on-active-service-members-homes/[/url]
[url]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/16/illegal-foreclosures_n_1283467.html[/url]
[url]http://www.propublica.org/article/bank-of-america-lied-to-homeowners-and-rewarded-foreclosures[/url]
You can find this type of shit everywhere. Ask most of the people who've had their homes foreclosed on, and they'll tell you how they ran them around the block.[/QUOTE]
And you didn't get a lawyer for this...because...?
[QUOTE=Zephyrs;45773546]And you didn't get a lawyer for this...because...?[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=AlbertWesker;45773212]Holy fuck... please tell me those settlement payments don't interfere with the possibility of filing a class action lawsuit.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Headhumpy;45766161]Alright, thanks for explaining. Sorry for my tone, I jumped to conclusions in that post. Are you sure you can't pursue further legal action, possibly find other homeowners who got fucked over like that and get a class action going?
In any case, I still believe the financial system as it is isn't completely broken. It needs further oversight and more proactive regulation but calling for it to be dismantled is probably a bit extreme.[/QUOTE]
Sorry, I was tired when I wrote out that long post. I don't think it needs to be dismantled, but some people do need to be fired, and or arrested.
But anyways. We got a lawyer when they told us we needed to leave, and we've been going after them.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.