A 60 Minutes report on banks involved in Fraudclosure may present more brand marketing headaches for some major banks.
In a news story that premiered April 3rd, 2011 on CBS 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley revealed shocking news about how banks, including Wells Fargo and US Bank, had hired a firm to help track paperwork related to bank signatures. But what they ended up with according to one attorney, is fraudulent paperwork.
CBS reported that we are nearly back to great recession housing prices as a new crisis looms. Banks can’t find the ownership documents, that got caught up in the mortgage swaps. The assignment of mortgage documents appear to have been fraudulently recreated, as discovered by an attorney who happens to specialize in forged document fraud.
One signature of a “Linda Green,” appeared as the VP of over 20 banks. CBS found Mrs. Green in rural Georgia. In 2003, she went to work at a company called “Dox” a company that the report states created forged mortgage documents-recreating missing mortgage assignments for the banks and providing legally required signatures of banks vp’s. Mrs. Green, who never was a bank VP, was the name used because it was short and easy to sign, according to the CBS report.
People were paid $10 an hour to sign documents with the Linda Green name, signing the name, up to hundreds of signatures per hour, up to 4000 signatures per day.
It was a common practice to flood the courts in recent years with these documents.
The attorney in the story who discovered the fraudulent practices said that banks who had papers created by the “Dox” papermill included Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, Citibank, and US Bank.
60 Minutes contacted each of those banks and they said they farmed out their mortgage servicing work to other companies and it was those mortgage services firms that hired Dox, owned by LPS (Lender Processing Services).
Ok, so here’s the deal. If you’re one of these banks, how do you respond on your website (and blog if you have one)? What’s your strategy? Do you practice full open disclosure explaining what happened? Or do you just ignore the conversation even as spreads it across the Internet?
What are your thoughts?
