CNN Money:

Now CNNMoney is hearing from former Wells Fargo (WFC) workers around the country who tried to put a stop to these illegal tactics. Almost half a dozen workers who spoke with us say they paid dearly for trying to do the right thing: they were fired.

“They ruined my life,” Bill Bado, a former Wells Fargo banker in Pennsylvania, told CNNMoney.

Bado not only refused orders to open phony bank and credit accounts. The New Jersey man called an ethics hotline and sent an email to human resources in September 2013, flagging unethical sales activities he was being instructed to do.

Eight days after that email, a copy of which CNNMoney obtained, Bado was terminated. The stated reason? Tardiness.

Rebuild trust??? Stumpf wouldn’t know the word “trust” if it bit him in the butt. Will he give back all of the customers’ monies that they screwed,  will restore all screwed customers’ credit report, will he and all board members give back all of the stock and bonuses that they profitted for 5 years and will Stumpf and the entire board get clawback of their salaries??? Sorry Stumpf, don’t want to hear your sob story. Yer just got caught!

From Wells Fargo press release:

The Re-REMIC Gimmick at JPMorgan Chase

see http://www.nationalmortgagenews.com/news/secondary/jpmorgan-revives-the-re-remic-cmbs-style-1087036-1.html

Brian Kennedy was surprised when he logged onto the Wells Fargo website to pay his mortgage and discovered he had a checking account he never asked for.

And it had a negative balance of $60 for two months of fees and penalties.

Kennedy went to his local Wells Fargo branch to complain, and the account was promptly closed. But the bank charged him a $1 fee for the privilege. He reached into his pocket and handed the bank officer a dollar bill to close the account he never wanted.

“It really pissed me off,” said Kennedy, a retiree in Westminster, Maryland. “They expect people to not be paying attention and hope you don’t notice. I’ve got a high credit score and I want to keep it that way. As soon as rates drop enough I’m going to refinance out of their mortgage.”

Wells Fargo (WFC) has agreed to

Charlotte Observer:

Julie Miller was working in Pennsylvania for Wachovia when Wells Fargo took over the Charlotte bank in 2008 and began changing more than the name on its branches.

Miller said she watched with dismay as Wells Fargo increased her branch’s sales goals and lowered bonuses for meeting the new targets. The changes took place around 2011, when her branch converted to the Wells Fargo name, she said.

“It became a living nightmare,” said Miller, 52, who no longer works for Wells Fargo. “They almost doubled our goals and decreased our incentive pay. It drove me to drink.”

Miller said her health began deteriorating as she tried to meet daily requirements that her branch sell 42 products, like mortgages and lines of credit, and open seven checking accounts.

That’s when she also started noticing Wells Fargo customers complaining they were being signed up for products they never asked for.

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]