Here is comment from someone following the HAMP SCAM

"That’s crazy that they keep SAYING something different every time you call but then again, when it’s a scam you have to make it up as you go."
M

Bank of America keeps telling me I cannot apply for the HAMP again.

I am wondering if they are just trying to discourage as many people as possible. Now that the gig is up, and they can't use HAMP to rack up excess fees anymore, without the light of the world being shone upon them, they no longer have any interest in the game?

I will call again in a day or so and apply again with someone new. Each and every person I spoke with said something different.

One said you need to wait 30 days after you are denied to apply again. Another said you need to have new extra income to apply again. Another said you have to wait until you get the denial LETTER in the mail. Of course I never got any letter....but that's OK, this will all be addressed in my law suit. How they dragged me through the proverbial ringer for 20 months just to increase the fees they can collect when they foreclose. The bogus fees they charge for having people drive up to my house over and over again to confirm occupancy, when I have sent them repeated proof of my occupancy.

I sent them my driver's license, recent utilily bills, car insurance, phone bills etc, yet still they need to pay people to come knock on my door at 8 am. And the funny thing is that they pay these people $50. and they charge Fannie Mae $100. for the "service" that was never needed in the first place.

The bottom line is until some of the top CEOs start paying with their freedom, AKA "prison" this crap is not going to stop. Let me rephrase that more positively. When they start throwing these CEOs in jail then this corruption WILL STOP.

A Young Lawyer's Fight To Save The Homes Of Low-Income Families

For some low-income homeowners in DC, a home loan modification can mean the difference between keeping a house that's been in the family for generations, and homelessness.

But pursuing a modification can also mean endless phone calls, pricey faxes, and piles of paperwork with no guarantee of protection from wrongful rejection. This is where Jennifer Ngai comes in.

Jennifer, a 30-year-old attorney and Equal Justice Works Americorps Legal Fellow at the Legal Aid Society, specializes in navigating this frustrating system for Washington, D.C. residents who qualify for loan modifications, but are trapped in an endless maze of contradictory information. She tirelessly works to secure permanent, affordable modifications for families who would otherwise be homeless.

Jennifer explained that despite the fact that banks were given financial incentives to work with homeowners who are behind on their loans, "the reality is that no one could possibly make it through the phone and fax system where you can never talk to the same person twice, and you get inconsistent information."

"A lot of my clients belong to this very specific population of being very low income, where if they lost their house, they would truly be at the very bottom of the poverty level and they could not afford to rent," Jennifer said. "I have clients who have very, very low mortgages and defy many of the stereotypes that I think a lot of people in foreclosure are judged by." Jennifer said clients have been brought to foreclosure owing as little as $2000. "Frankly, the bank doesn't care what the dollar amount is," she added.

Jennifer said her most representative case involved working with a home owner who lost her job at a department store and realized that she wouldn't be able to make the $500 monthly payments on her home equity loan. But because her husband had a large enough salary, she qualified for a modification. "She tried, but every time she called, she got different information," Jennifer said. When Jennifer got involved, the family were just a week from losing their home, pulling their daughter out of school and finding another place to live.

"We had to put up a fight," she said. But in the end, they got the interest rate and payments lowered to an affordable level, and the term extended to 30 years. "They were able to carry on with their lives," Jennifer said.

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AdvertisementEven as an attorney, Jennifer said she gets the same runaround as her Legal Aid clients. "The only difference between me and a homeowner is that I have the leverage of understanding the legal requirements of the bank, and the program requirements of [the Obama Administrations Home Affordable Modification Program], so I can escalate and I can threaten to litigate, and I can litigate if I have to," said Jennifer.

If endless phone calls don't work, Jennifer explained she knows how to get in touch with people higher up the ladder at mortgage companies, even going as far as writing letters to the CEO.

"The best thing we've found is to keep things in writing, and to escalate, escalate, escalate," she said.

"[This] sometimes means trying to work with someone in the office of the president of a mortgage company, sometimes it means trying to find a legal contact, sometimes it means writing to the CEO because you just can't get traction with anybody else."

Though she's dabbled in the realm of corporate law, Jennifer's has always leaned toward work in the public interest arena.

"Towards the end of college, I was really looking for a way to use communication skills, and be a bit more of a problem solver," said Jennifer.

She was working in consumer law, mostly working with big companies when she found out the Legal Aid Society were planning to help low income families dealing with foreclosures.

Immediately, she wanted to be part of it and hasn't looked back. "It's really rewarding work," she said.

by Yepoka Yeebo

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/08/no-way-to-live_n_819935.html#s236280&title=The_Financial_Crisis

Not a single prosecution for the banking fraud that has been committed.

Oh but their time will come, I see it clearly before me. It is still not entirely well know amoung the mainstream population what the banks have done, but their day in court will come, I feel it.

It will be somewhat amazing when it all comes out. Someone will write a best selling book, Oprah will do a piece on it and people will act surpirsed and suddenly sympathetic. I hope I can forgive them.

For those of us who got caught up in the cogs of this broken down machine, we will be long gone and oblivious to the pain and suffering of the next group of "middle class" people to fall. Why should be care about them? They pointed a finger at us as we fell. They blammed us as we clawed and begged for survival. We were alone, so we thought. No one to talk to, we blammed ourselves. People committed suicide. I have stories of some of these people on this blog. They didn't know that there were millions of Americans falling. They felt alone and to blame. Obviously they weren't.

I remember a few years ago a story of a family, you all probably remember this story. Both the mother and father were laid off from their jobs. The father killed his wife, his three children and himself. At the time I thought it outrageous, but having lived through the war of financial destruction, I understand it now in a way I NEVER COULD HAVE BEFORE. It has made me a stronger person, a deeper person, an angrier and a happier person all at the same time.

I know what failure looks like from the inside, and its ugly. I know what it feels like and I know what it feels like to think that you would be better off dead. As crazy as that sounds, I guess its one of those things you just have to have been there!

I wish I could have a chat with that father today. Had he only known what was happening, had he known what was going to happen, had he just not been so unlucky to be one of the first to fall, maybe, just maybe that
family would be here today, happily living in their affordable rental.

Shahien Nasiripour Financial Crisis Prosecutions On Wall Street Slow To Develop Despite Cries For Justice

NEW YORK -- After the last major banking crisis, some two decades ago, roughly 3,800 bankers were prosecuted and sentenced to prison terms, by the Justice Department's count. Yet this time, some four years after the economy descended into the most punishing financial crisis since the Great Depression, the public still waits for the Obama administration to deliver a similar kind of justice.

The 2007-'09 financial crisis was "avoidable," a bipartisan, congressionally-appointed panel concluded last week. Mortgage fraud "flourished" in the run up to the collapse. Securities fraud was apparently widespread.

"Lenders made loans that they knew borrowers could not afford and that could cause massive losses to investors in mortgage securities," the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wrote in its report on the causes of the collapse. About $1 trillion worth of home loans made from 2005 to 2007 were "fraudulent," the commission said, citing testimony from experts. The Illinois Attorney General, Lisa Madigan, told the commission that she defined fraud to include lenders' "sale of unaffordable or structurally-unfair mortgage products to borrowers."

And yet, the perp walk so many Americans crave -- Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner once referred to it as the "very deep public desire for Old Testament justice" -- hasn't occurred. Wall Street figures have largely gone untouched. Bank directors kept their jobs. In a sign that perhaps the fallout from the crisis has passed, outsized compensation is back.

"People need to go to jail," said Liz Ryan Murray, policy director of National People's Action, an advocacy organization that helped launch the website CrimeShouldntPay.com. "If you steal something, you go to jail. If you falsify documents, you go to jail. Why doesn't that apply to big bank executives?"

Officials from the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have been asked those questions before -- often during testimony before various congressional panels. DOJ prosecutes crimes, while the SEC files civil cases, though it can also refer cases to Justice for criminal prosecution.

But those powers haven't been used enough, experts say. The law-enforcement agencies suffer from a lack of combativeness. They're handicapped by the fact that they're looking at potential violations not while they're in the act, but long after they were committed. And they deal with complicated transactions that could be difficult to explain to juries, rendering their efforts to take cases to trial more challenging.

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Advertisement"These are tremendously difficult cases to make," said retired federal judge Stanley Sporkin, who worked at the SEC for 20 years, seven of them as head of the commission's enforcement division.

Referring to the most prevalent allegations of fraud, those involving home mortgages and the financial instruments they were packed into, Sporkin said law enforcement is likely having trouble "finding where it started, what the person did, and where the fraud is."

Last year, the Justice Department promised to take swift action. "By taking dramatic action, our goal is not just to hold accountable those whose conduct may have contributed to the last meltdown, but to deter such future conduct as well," Attorney General Eric Holder said in January 2010 during testimony before the crisis commission.

A year later, that action hasn't materialized, despite evidence of conduct that would seem to merit it. Last week, the Federal Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded that banks that sold home-loan bonds often didn't disclose key details that would have helped investors accurately judge the quality of the investments. Investors were rarely told, for example, whether the mortgages failed to meet the banks' own standards.

That failure raises "the question of whether the disclosures were materially misleading, in violation of the securities laws," the crisis commission said. It referred several financial-industry figures to law enforcement for potential prosecution.

"I'm frustrated," former Sen. Ted Kaufman told Lanny Breuer, the assistant attorney general heading the Justice Department's criminal division, and Robert Khuzami, head of enforcement at the SEC, during a September hearing. "We have seen very little in the way of senior officer- or boardroom-level prosecutions of the people on Wall Street who brought this country to the brink of financial ruin. Why is that? Is it because none of the behavior in question was criminal? Is it because too much time passed before the investigators got serious? I mean is it -- has the trail gone cold?"

Or, the Delaware Democrat asked, "Is it because the law favors the wealthy and powerful?"

Jeff Connaughton, Kaufman's former chief of staff, said prosecutors and enforcement officials at the SEC aren't being aggressive enough.

Last November, Connaughton delivered a stinging speech to about 300 regulators and Wall Street executives at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York slamming law enforcement's response to the financial crisis.

Fraud was at the heart of the crisis, he said. And law enforcement's response has been inadequate, to the point that it is unlikely to deter future financial fraud.

"Where are the cases?" Connaughton asked. "There have been many successful cases brought against mortgage brokers, as well as an impressive list of recent cases against Ponzi schemes and insider trading."

But after the Justice Department in 2009 lost a high-profile case against two hedge-fund managers at the defunct investment firm Bear Stearns Cos., Connaughton noted, there have not been any additional criminal indictments at major firms for behavior connected with the financial crisis.

"They realized how difficult it is to make a case" in the litigation against Bear Stearns, Sporkin said. "These are not easy cases."

Sporkin added that the SEC and the Justice Department may now be "gun-shy."

In September, Kaufman said he had thus far "waited in vain for the sort of prosecutions that we predicted would come" as a result of the financial industry's near-collapse.

"Criminals on Wall Street must be held to account," he said.

DOJ and SEC spokesmen declined to make officials available to answer questions on the record. Instead, the spokesmen referred questions to previous congressional testimony and public speeches.

The SEC said it had pursued executives at New Century Financial, once the nation's second-largest subprime mortgage lender; Goldman Sachs Group; Citigroup; and a top executive at Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, once the nation's largest nonbank mortgage lender. Most of those cases have been settled.

"We've brought a series of important enforcement actions in areas that most people associate with the financial crisis, and recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors in those cases," Lorin Reisner, deputy director of the SEC's enforcement division, wrote in an email. But, he added, "there is more work to be done."

The Justice Department also indicted the Taylor, Bean & Whitaker executive, Lee B. Farkas, and is said to be pursing a criminal investigation of Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide Financial, once the nation's biggest mortgage lender.

In a November speech, Breuer, the assistant attorney general, touted Justice's few victories and explained the department's philosophy. It's emblematic of law enforcement's overall tone towards the financial sector, experts say.

"There are some who, despite this track record, have expressed disappointment that we have not yet criminally prosecuted the leading financial institutions or their principals for conduct that may have helped lead to the financial crisis," Breuer said Nov. 4 in New York. "Though I can certainly understand the impulse and desire to hold someone accountable, I also want to stress an equally important principle - that we can, and will, only bring charges when the facts and the law convince us that we can prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt."

Added Breuer: "We simply can't, and won't, indict people based on outrage or suspicion alone."

While he oversaw the SEC's enforcement division, Sporkin took a different approach.

The former judge, who also served as general counsel at the Central Intelligence Agency after he left the SEC, said his philosophy could best be described as "getting in the first strike."

"What I tried to do was be ahead of the curve," Sporkin said. "Rather than react, I was looking for the issues and then striking almost as you would in a war."

Sporkin's team, he said, looked for laws that enabled them to go after what they viewed as fraudulent activity.

"We were being instinctive. We were using our abilities to say, 'What the hell is going on here?' and then using the law to go after" corporations and Wall Street firms engaged in wrongdoing, he said.

Sporkin's approach stands opposite that of today's law enforcement, said Joshua Rosner, managing director at independent research consultancy Graham Fisher & Co.

"In the old days, [the SEC] was not shy about bringing actions against even the largest firms and would litigate," Rosner said. "The offender knew that settling without admission of wrongdoing was not an option."

Rosner said the risk that prosecution poses to a firm's reputation is much more effective when trying to change future behavior, as opposed to the SEC's current approach of settlements and fines. He added that the SEC appears to be going after small-time crooks, rather than big firms on Wall Street.

"The SEC might as well list the penalties today so banks can just build it into their necessary rates of returns on infractions -- kind of like the back of a parking ticket," he said.

The former SEC enforcement chief said another problem hindering current prosecution of financiers is the lack of dramatics associated with today's financial crimes.

"You got to make it sound like it's somebody coming to you, knocking on your head, and taking money out of your pocket," Sporkin said of his approach to juries and explaining financial wrongdoing to the public. "You just can't try these as some kind of academic case."

"Too bad he's not at the SEC now," Rosner said of Sporkin. Likewise, Connaughton, Sen. Kaufman's former chief of staff, said law enforcement "needs someone like a Stanley Sporkin."

Even Sporkin, however, stressed that prosecutors and enforcement attorneys at the SEC face an uphill battle.

"How do you tell a jury that a person who didn't disclose something in a report should go to jail?" he asked. "These are hard cases to dramatize."

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For anyone who has spent any time in fear or shame, this article is for you.

People from all walks of life have found themselves in this situation. Its not your fault, you are not to blame, nor are you alone. Life will get better; keep moving forward and leave the guilt, fear and shame at the door-step of your favorite bank.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/03/learning-to-walk-underwater-mortgages_n_818315.html