Source:
KGBT/Valley Central<snip>
Lucy Morris says, "The FTC alleges that CountryWide took advantage of homeowners who were trying to save their homes, by piling on unnecessary default fees, and mismanaging their loans and bankruptcy."
Here's how this works. You stop paying your mortgage, your lender's going to step in and they're going to protect their collateral, which is your house. They're going to do things like title searches, inspections - maybe even yard work.Then they're going to bill those services to you - the homeowner.
But rather than simply hire third-party vendors to perform the services, Countrywide created subsidiaries to hire those vendors. The subsidiaries marked up the price of the services charged by the vendors - often by 100% or more.
So CountryWide's subsidiary would pay a local guy, say $50 to cut the grass. They'd then double that to $100, send it to CountryWide, then CountryWide would bill the homeowner for that much. CountryWide - now owned by Bank of America - neither admitted nor denied guilt - but they did agree to pay more than 100 million dollars to reimburse homeowners.
Read more:
http://www.valleycentral.com/news/story.aspx?id=542085
Another story out reported that if a homeowner drops homeowner coverage, banksters replace that homeowner coverage at bankster owned insurance companies with markups of over 500 percent, then of course bill the homeowner.
Banksters working overtime finding ways to screw the working class.