Desperate House Owners Facing Foreclosure Preyed Upon by New Scam
Desperate house owners facing foreclosure are preyed upon by a new scam that is gnawing into thousands of dollars and losing their houses. One couple victimized was Tim and Jenny Lawson. They were lagging behind three months on their mortgage loan of $390,000 when they got a letter from a firm named US Loan Auditors offering their help.
The letter informed them that their lender was under probe for indulging in predatory lending and it seems that the couple could have been a victim. Thus they are eligible to take part in a legal suit against the lender.
The couple paid the firm $8,900 over a span of five months and further, as per the advice of the firm, they desisted from making any more mortgage payments. Jenny Lawson informed that in their names a lawsuit was filed but only after their house had been foreclosed upon. They had to exit from their house containing three bedrooms last September. Today they are camping in a trailer-park in a recreational vehicle an hour’s distance from Sacramento. Jenny bemoaned that the firm’s promises did not materialize; instead they are now facing this sort of a situation.
The attorney general of California said the couple was victimized by a new kind of scam that is now running wild across the country targeting those caught up in the latest twist to the foreclosure crisis.
These firms with impressive names like US Loan Auditors are saying that they will undertake “forensic audits” of the mortgage deal to find proof of “predatory lending”. This evidence would be taken as a tool to haul up the lenders in court forcing them to agree to new contracts on favourable terms. The scammers make very bold claims but in most of the cases these audits cannot give the house owners the relief they are seeking said James Reilly Dolan of Federal Trade Commission (assistant director – financial practices).
Last October, Jerry Brown the attorney general of California sued this particular firm US Loan Auditor and its legal branch My US Legal Servicers together with its owners for cheating house owners of $60 million. The money ranged from some thousand dollars to $55,000 in one instance. The suit is asking for imposition of civil penalties, compensation for the victims and orders to block further similar activities of the firm. The legal papers submitted by Brown contend that the defendants had lied to the clients at each step. They had provided “nothing of value and put them in even greater danger of losing their homes”
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