DAUGHERTY v. OCWEN LOAN SERVICING, LLC

U.S. District Courtcase number 5:14-cv-24506

BECKLEY – A Wood County man will receive more than $2.5 million after a federal jury said a mortgage service company didn’t investigate his repeated disputes of his credit report.

A federal jury on May 23 awarded $6,128.39 in compensatory damages and $2.5 million in punitive damages to David M. Daugherty of Vienna. He had sued Ocwen Loan Servicing LLC and EquifaxInformation Services LLC in Raleigh County in 2014. The defendants had the case removed to federal court.

After a six-day trial before Judge Irene Berger, the jury ruled in favor of Daugherty, saying Ocwen willfully violated the Fair Credit and Reporting Act. One component of that act requires that a company investigate all disputes. Daugherty had filed several disputes with Ocwen after receiving Equifax credit reports showing him behind on his mortgage payment.

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By David Dayen, Author of Chain of Title and winner of the Studs Terkel Prize via Vice

http://www.vice.com/read/what-happened-when-the-fbi-investigated-foreclosure-fraud-in-florida

Six years ago, FBI agents in Jacksonville, Florida, wrote a memo to their bosses in Washington, DC, that could have unraveled the largest consumer fraud in American history. It went to the heart of the shady mortgage industry that precipitated the financial crisis, and the case promised to involve nearly every major bank in the country, honing in on the despicable practice of using bogus documents to illegally kick people out of their homes.

But despite impaneling a grand jury, calling in dozens of agents and forensic examiners, doing 75 interviews, issuing hundreds of subpoenas, and reviewing millions of documents, the criminal investigation resulted in just one conviction. And that convict—Lorraine Brown, CEO of the third-party company DocX that facilitated the fraud scheme—was sent to prison for duping the banks.

Thanks to…