“My bank said they’re willing to help me!” Yea, right

Massachusetts Sues 5 Major Banks Over Foreclosure Practices

The rampant criminality of the big banks regarding loan modifications and foreclosures is finally being put into the spotlight, thanks to a few serious state’s attorneys.

In addition to shining a light on what the banks have been up to ever since they were bailed out by the tax payers, the states are also shaming the Feds by speaking out on violations and deception about which the regulators have remained silent.

Shame on you, feds.

Martha Coakley, with her staff in Boston, accused lenders of “deceptive and unlawful conduct.”

Citing extensive abuses of troubled borrowers across Massachusetts, the state’s attorney general sued the nation’s five largest mortgage lenders on Thursday, seeking relief for consumers hurt by what she called unfair and deceptive business practices.

The attorney general, Martha Coakley, and her investigators contend that the banks improperly foreclosed on troubled borrowers by relying on fraudulent legal documentation or by failing to modify loans for homeowners after promising to do so. The suit also contends that the banks’ use of MERS “corrupted” the state’s public land recording system by not registering legal transfers properly.

“There is no question that the deceptive and unlawful conduct by Wall Street and the large banks played a central role in this crisis through predatory lending and securitization of those loans,” Ms. Coakley said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit. “The banks may think they are too big to fail or too big to care about the impact of their actions, but we believe they are not too big to have to obey the law.”

Officials at all of the banks issued statements saying they would fight the suit.

How do the bankers respond? By pretending to care about the very homeowners whom they’ve been victimizing, of course.

Vickee Adams of Wells Fargo said, “Regrettably, the action announced in Massachusetts today will do little to help Massachusetts homeowners or the recovery of the housing economy in the Commonwealth.”

“So far the servicers have escaped any real review or punishment for their bad practices because federal regulators have by and large given them a pass on whether they followed the law in foreclosures,” Mr. Eggert said. “This lawsuit argues that they haven’t followed the law and that they can’t just fix all their problems after the fact.”

Among the misconduct cited in the Massachusetts complaint were 14 cases of foreclosures by institutions that had not shown proof that they had the legal right to seize the underlying properties when they did so. All the banks also deceived troubled borrowers, the complaint said, about the loan modification process.

“If the state can go forward and do real discovery, it will be the first time that anyone has really dug into the servicers’ files to see what they have done,” he added. “The feds conducted an investigation where they looked at very few files, and here the state could demand to see a lot.”

 It boggles the mind that the the Feds have given the banks a pass from the time they gave them 156  billion dollars in tax payer cash to the present day.