Foreclosure victims begin receiving pitiful checks yesterday...guess what? insufficient funds

[sabrina 1]

32. In some cases, quite a few actually, when people realized they might have problems keeping up their

mortgage payments, after maybe losing their jobs, they applied for a mortgage adjustment until things returned to normal for them. There was a program set up by the President under which people could do this. I believer there were several criteria and if they met all of them, this program was designed to help people stay in their homes. It was part of trying to help 'Main Street' after we bailed the culprits who crashed the economy.

Bear with me, because this part is almost unbelievable. After applying for a mortgage adjustment, homeowners were often told not to make any mortgage payments while their cases were under review. This is what happened to my friend btw and at first I didn't believe her. She was one month behind when this started, after her husband died. She qualified under the President's act and expected no real problems. However, after not hearing back from the bank, after writing, calling and being ignored for a few months, she became nervous about not paying and sent a check for the amount she was requesting as her payment. They returned her check. They contacted her to tell her mortgage HAD been adjusted. And this is the unbelievable part, they RAISED her payment.

Shortly after that, they began foreclosure proceedings. I won't go into all that happened before she finally lost her home but I will say, she was TRICKED into not paying and falling behind, they refused her payment and then went after her.

In the beginning when she was telling me this, I'm ashamed to say I thought she had handled something wrong, that she was confused. I couldn't believe that they would refuse payment, that they would RAISE the payment for someone who had applied for a reduction. And that they would not speak to her at all all of which pushed her out of her home.

Shortly afterwards I saw people on TV and like my friend, most were NOT behind in their payments, but were struggling and wanted an adjustment. In every case what happened to my friend, happened to them. They were told NOT to pay while waiting for their case to be addressed. When it was, their payments were RAISED, then they were told they were 'behind' for non-payment, when it was the bank who told them not to pay.

I realized then that my friend had done nothing wrong, that she had been scammed into foreclosure by the bank, and also found out that this was widespread. To try to avoid foreclosure she took the advice of Rep. Kaptur and others and demanded to see the note. She was ignored. At that point she discovered that her mortgage had been transferred twice by Mers, and there probably WAS no note. Robo signing was exposed around that time and we realized this was why the law mill handling her case refused to talk to her and even her attorney at all.

She lost her home as did so many others. Two years later her situation changed drastically for the better. A year ago she was contacted by the OCC telling her her foreclosure had been reviewed and she was entitled to a settlement. She did not trust them. They contacted her again and offered her a check for $800 dollars which she ignored.

We believe now she may never have legally owned the home, the bank that foreclosed in her Wells Fargo, most likely did not hold the note. Notes were destroyed by MERS and her home had been transferred twice by MERS. Now it was more than just her application for a modification. It was about whether she or the bank, ever legally owned it.

This situation has been repeated over and over and was part of the scam that lost people their homes. The Govt's attempt to deal with it after the whole scam was exposed, robo-signing, MERS, pushing people out of their homes etc, knowing the Banks were in big trouble, once again, facing perhaps millions of lawsuits, was to try to get a settlement with the banks and to prevent all the States' Attorneys who were preparing to take action against the banks, from doing so. They conjured up what this OP is about, getting the banks to pay for a settlement to give money back to people, like my friend and I guess, hope lawsuits would go away.

All of the US Attorneys finally agreed to discard their plans to prosecute the banks in return for this settlement, except NY's US Attorney, Schneiderman. He wanted a guarantee that homeowners' right to sue would NOT be taken away in any settlement. After refusing to budge on this, they agreed.

My friend is suing Wells Fargo. She has not accepted the insulting money they offered her. It simply added insult to injury.

The law mill that handled her case and drove her out of her home, run by Steven Baum, is closed. He is under investigation by the US Attorney and may have been prosecuted already, I know he has been named in a huge class action suit of thousands of people whose homes he foreclosed on.

And yet, with evidence of all this fraud and deception, not one bank has been held accountable. So now it's up to the people to sue them and force them to do what our govt refused to do, pay back the value of their homes to those they cheated out of them.

That is just one way in which many people lost their homes. There are others, but this is one I am familiar with.