The time to challenge your foreclosure is NOW!
If there ever was a time to challenge your Chase foreclosure, it is now.
It’s late, and it’s limited, but for borrowers who feel their homes were wrongly or inappropriately foreclosed upon in 2009 and 2010, there is now recourse.
As part of a larger enforcement action (so-called “consent orders”) taken last April against fourteen of the nation’s largest mortgage banks/servicers following the so-called “robo-signing” scandal, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is beginning a “multi-faceted independent review of foreclosure actions.”
The major banks, including Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, GMAC, and EMC, will have to fund these independent reviews to evaluate, “whether borrowers suffered financial injury through errors, misrepresentations, or other deficiencies in foreclosure practices.” If they did, those borrowers get some kind of “remediation.”
“The challenge is substantial, but the steps we have required the servicers to take are vitally important to resolving these issues in a way that respects the rights of those who have been harmed and helps to restore confidence in the system,” said John Walsh, Comptroller of the Currency in a statement.
The major mortgage servicers began sending out letters to eligible borrowers today to explain the process. The requests for the reviews must be received by April 30, 2012. So how many do they expect will request these reviews, given that there are potentially four and a quarter million eligible borrowers according to the OCC?
While most of the press I’ve read about this focuses on people who were foreclosed upon that should not have been (i.e. they were current on their mortgage) that represents just a small portion of the people Chase has wronged.
Where Chase has done the most harm is with the people that it told to stop paying their mortgage so they could be considered for a loan modification (and then foreclosed), the people that Chase said didn’t qualify for a loan modification (even though they should have), and the people that Chase blatantly foreclosed upon while they were in a trial modification and paying according to the rules (parallel foreclosure).
It is hard to say whether such customers will get a serious look under this program, but by challenging the foreclosure anyways, you are helping to send Chase a message and perhaps the regulators overseeing this process will take notice.
In other words, it’s worth a shot.
Foreclosure | admin November 7, 2011
