For years, Wells Fargo employees secretly issued credit cards without a customer’s consent. They created fake email accounts to sign up customers for online banking services. They set up sham accounts that customers learned about only after they started accumulating fees.

On Thursday, these illegal banking practices cost Wells Fargo $185 million in fines, including a $100 million penalty from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the largest such penalty the agency has issued.

Federal banking regulators said the practices, which date back to 2011, reflected serious flaws in the internal culture and oversight at Wells Fargo, one of the nation’s largest banks. The bank has fired at least 5,300 employees who were involved.

In all, Wells Fargo employees opened roughly 1.5 million bank accounts and applied for 565,000 credit cards that may not have been authorized by customers, the regulators said in a news conference. The bank has 40…

It is getting increasingly obvious to the courts that there is something inherently wrong with foreclosures. The substitutions without leave of court and the repeated filing for foreclosure on the same default are coming back to bite the ‘securitization fail” scheme of the banks.

see http://www.newyorklawjournal.com/id=1202766695379/Deutsche-Bank-Trust-Co-Americas-v-Smith-20152381?kw=Deutsche%20Bank%20Trust%20Co.%20Americas%20v.%20Smith%2C%202015-2381&cn=20160907&pt=Daily%20Decisions&src=EMC-Email&et=editorial&bu=New%20York%20Law%20Journal&slreturn=20160807093854

If you start with the premise that the trusts were never funded and therefore never existed, everything starts to make sense. In ordinary circumstances with ordinary loans the pronouncement of every bank foreclosure attorney rings hollow: “Judge this is a standard foreclosure.” If that were true they wouldn’t be losing cases procedurally, allowing them to linger sometimes for a decade or more, and they wouldn’t be trying to slip in a “substitution of Plaintiff” without leave of court. And they probably would not be foreclosing on so many dead people.

This case, decided today, gives us an example of how things can go wrong…

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) approved rues on August 5, 2016, to help prevent wrongful home foreclosures.

Mortgage servicers will be required to promptly notify borrowers when loss mitigation applications are complete.  Many mortgage servicers never considered an application complete and repeatedly demanded information and documents that the borrower had already provided.  Many borrowers complained that the servicers often demanded federal income tax returns over and over.  Borrowers were required to make adjusted monthly payments while the applications were pending.  The repeated stalling benefited the banks and servicers.  Many borrowers reported that when their applications were finally refused, the interim payments were never credited to their accounts.  Servicers are also prohibited from dual tracking – pursuing both a modification and a foreclosure simultaneously.

… [Read More]

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/fiu-grads-eerie-photos-explore-homes-abandoned-in-the-housing-crisis-8735937

Five years ago, as a journalism student at Florida International University, Nicole Taylor-Lang began thinking of ways to flesh out her photography portfolio. She didn’t have to look far: Only a block from her Greenacres home in Palm Beach County, she found the first subject of what would become a years-long passion project.

It was a white and beige house with boarded-up windows and a chimney shooting out of one corner. The yard was overgrown with weeds, and it looked like no one had lived there in several years.

“It had a very Little House on the Prairie feel,” Taylor-Lang says. “That house I call my baby. All of a sudden, it just started intriguing me, [these] abandoned properties.”

Since then, Taylor-Lang has traveled South Florida photographing empty homes and businesses to document the aftermath of the housing crisis, which continues to scar the landscape nearly eight years after it began. Some…