Wells Fargo caught with "how to defraud homeowners" manual.

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. Another look at the issue:

Found another story which puts it in more succinct terms:

"this manual allegedly showed its employees how to fudge paperwork to fill the hole in the bank’s case."

Throughout the years-long foreclosure crisis that followed the housing market collapse, homeowner advocates and bank watchdogs have warned that banks were taking families’ homes using flawed, incomplete, and nonexistent documents. Falsified documents were at the core of the so-called “robosigning” scandal that lead to an ineffective and often exaggerated settlement with five large mortgage servicers, including Wells Fargo. More than $1.4 trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities are based on forged and otherwise invalid documents, leaving the associated home loans in a legal grey area.

Millions of other foreclosures are believed to have been based on incomplete documentation, thanks in large part to the craze for packaging loans up and selling them off to other firms during the pre-crisis housing finance bubble. Those rapid sales and re-sales of mortgages from one company to another to a third lead to millions of mortgage transfers that lack the proper paperwork and are therefore legally unenforceable. Brokers and traders made money based on the volume of transactions they completed rather than on the quality of their work, and as a result millions of foreclosures have been conducted illegally.

Considering the vast evidence that mortgage servicers routinely break the rules and lie to homeowners, it’s not hard to imagine that Wells Fargo could have actually written down a guide to foreclosing unlawfully.
What is startling is that the banks are finding new ways to profit even further from the foreclosure crisis. Wall Street is buying up the houses they’ve kicked people out of and turning them into rental properties and plans to apply the same sorts of wheeler-dealer money-making strategies to their new rental housing empire that they used with home loans prior to the financial crisis.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/03/13/3399511/wells-fargo-foreclosure-manual/