See Palm Beach Post
Bank bombshell! Backdated foreclosure letters may have harmed thousands
- 2 0 4 23
By Kim Miller
Ocwen Financial Corp. was accused this week by New York’s chief financial officer of backdating “potentially hundreds of thousands” of letters to borrowers that likely “caused them significant harm.”
The Tuesday letter from Superintendent of New York’s Department of Financial Services says the letters denied mortgage loan modifications and were dated more than 30 days prior to the date that Ocwen mailed the letter.
Ocwen has an office in West Palm Beach where it was formerly headquartered. It is now based in Atlanta.
“These borrowers were given 30 days from the date of the denial letter to appeal that denial, but those 30 days had already elapsed by the time they received the backdated letter,” Lawsky wrote. “In other cases, Ocwen’s systems show that borrowers facing foreclosure received letters with a date by which to cure their default and avoid foreclosure _ and the cure date was months prior to receipt of the letter.”
Ocwen, which is under investigation by the New York Department of Financial Services, said in a statement to Forbes that the letters were the result of “software errors in our correspondence systems,” and that 281 out of 283 borrowers who received letters with incorrect dates remain Ocwen borrowers.
“We are continuing to review the rest of the cases,” Ocwen told Forbes in a statement. “We believe that we have resolved the letter dating issues that have been identified to date, and we continue our investigation as to whether there are additional letter dating issues that need to be resolved.”
But Lawsky’s stern letter said that when his investigators found a backdated letter and confronted Ocwen with the information, they were told it was an isolated incident from 2012 that affected 6,100 letters. Ocwen said it fixed the problem in May of this year.
“Each of these representations turned out to be false,” Lawsky wrote.
“Ocwen finally admitted in a memorandum Sept. 10, 2014, that the backdating issue may not be isolated and that the changes to Ocwen’s systems in May 2014 did not fully resolve the problem,” Lawsky said.
Filed under: foreclosure |
well, midland mortgage ( also as midfirst bank) fabricated a purported “notice” that magically appeared for first time in court file after 2 years of filing fraudclosure , magician name : douglas c. zahm.
( oh, yes , judges did not care about it)
so be careful if you are in fraudclosure and these fraudsters are involved
My case is with Ocwen, in part…gotta chuckle here…backdated DOT to originator(New Century), still in bankruptcy in 2012, as attorney in fact. Ocwen is a real class act! Letters, assignments and transfers backdated too.
Reblogged this on patrickainsworth.
Wells Fargo never sent out the Borrowers Notice from the HAMP modifications because they never underwrote the freaking files. So if the letter not sent you could not dispute the results the NPV imputed numbers within the 30 day period to appeal!
Oh, it was a simple mistake… Slap hands, collect billions and pass go….
When will our illustrious courts face the facts? Never ending fraud, that cost us all a life time of our labors, our homes, and savings? The courts have let the banks off repeatedly with fines, that on the surface look monumental, but in reality, are a small cost of doing business for them.
If anyone thinks this is “inadvertent” back dated letters, I have bridge for you to buy.