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Wednesday, May 02, 2007

5/2/07:  My Hillis v Fair Isaac + Equifax settlement objection, declaration and exhibits

I hate when I don’t even have time to proofread a printout of my filings, but what can I do? 

5/2/07: My objection, declaration in support of my objection and exhibits

I copied objector Helfand’s format and limited my objection to new and additional points.  It definitely made it much easier having something to work off.

Even if you’re not interested in legal stuff, I highly recommend that you read the part about Suze Orman’s horrible advice.  Orman and Fair Isaac effectively conspire to act on behalf of debt collectors instead of providing to customers the advice they promise.

Of course I expect the substance of my objection to be ignored like just about every other filing I submit to the courts.  That’s why I’ll send out a press release next week, after reviewing the other objections that will hopefully be filed.

I didn’t mention Equifax enough, but that’s of course because I don’t order any products at Equifax directly and I require that my clients also order at myFICO.com.

I also forgot to mention a few issues, but I just had to get it in the mail.  And I requested that the class counsel send me the entire file, everything that’s not posted online as per my request.  Don’t know whether I have a RIGHT to all documents, but it seems that as my attorney, they should have to give me everything. And maybe it’ll encourage them to post it all at a free website. 

I’m especially interested in the discovery, for $4,000,000 in attorneys fees there ought to be some interesting stuff. 

Update 5/13/07: attorney Helfand’s objection, the complaint and some filings

I’m not a lawyer, my objection is based on my credit expertise and common sense, attorney Helfand presented LEGAL arguments.

Monday, April 30, 2007

Hillis v Equifax + Fair Isaac class action - certificate of service and court address

As promised, I just posted my certificate of service and the court’s address

For the objection I’m using the same first page as for the certificate of service.  Please let me know it there are any typos or other screwups—as always, I’m not an attorney.

The preliminary listing of objections:

1) That they will to post all documents at a public website
2) That nobody should be included unless benefits are received—only class members who apply for the benefits are prevented from suing
3) That if I have to opt out, I want the opportunity to do so AFTER the settlement is final
4) I’ll mention many of objector Helfland’s issues
5) ScoreWatch is worthless to most class members
6) The so-called benefits are nothing but a marketing campaign for the defendants

Almost forgot, the Garden City Group was the settlement administrator for my DirecTV nightmare, they’re NOT qualified.

Exhibits:  The current Suze Orman offering of personal advice and the false and misleading advice provided by the software generated credit report review at myFICO.  Helfland did a good job including Equifax website printouts.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

myFICO no longer reports the Equifax DLA - lawsuits must be filed NOW!

Somebody needs to sue Fair Isaac FAST!

This is the most important data for derogs on the Equifax reports.  As soon as you donate the $350 for the filing fee + $70 to serve Fair Isaac, I will file the lawsuit against Fair Isaac in federal court. 

Donate

I’m very sorry to have to admit that I don’t have the cash to file another lawsuit until I sold my home, got bills to pay.  I’d really prefer somebody else suing. 

Is it becoming obvious to everybody that I can’t change credit reporting by myself?

Do you really want LESS and LESS data on the reports and have the information you need to dispute replaced by idiotic worthless graphs?

Turn off your damned TV and DO something!

UPDATE:

Apparently Fair Isaac RENAMED the Equifax DLA and the Experian Date of Status to “Date of Last Payment.”

This is insane!

I spent the last 7 years teaching people that they need to look for the Equifax DLA to determine whether accounts are correctly aged off the Equifax report, and now I have to tell them that they need to look for the “date of last payment”, that it has NOTHING to do with the last payment and that ONLY on the myFICO reports the date of the last “payment” = last “activity.”

Why do people have to PAY me just to learn what the reported data means?  It’s hard enough to figure out what to dispute, is it really necessary to confuse consumers with entirely false field labels?

And the over 200 million Americans with credit reports wait for ME to file lawsuits, get dismissed in the totally corrupt Phoenix federal court, appeal, and MAYBE get some results in a few years?

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Reader mail:  Trans Union blocking myFICO report

Hi Christine.

I have been reading all through your sites.... bravo to you for fighting for the consumer!

I am now a victim of TU’s “file blocked...error code 403” and from myfico.com “error code 733”.  When I called MyFico the CSR said he couldn’t do anything for me to unlock my TU file because it says “excessive inquiries” as the reason for blockage.

Is this a violation I can sue TU for?  I would love to collect $1,000 per day for them blocking access to my report as per the FCRA. 

Any advice you can provide would be much appreciated!  I read your site where this happened to you in 2006 but I didn’t see an update.

Many thanks,

...

This is interesting, I haven’t heard of the “excessive inquiries” reason for blocking myFICO reports.  How many inquiries are there?

And I did recently sue Trans Union and this is one of my claims, they were just served in early April and I have not yet heard from them. 

The complaint and court filings

Can’t wait to do discovery and find out what they have to say.  Maybe they’re just trying to force consumers to buy credit reports directly from TU (TrueCredit).

Unfortunately, nobody gets $1,000/day for FCRA violations.  I’ve heard of a pro se litigant suing for several hundred thousand in TX under state law ($500/day), but I’ve never seen a judgment, a check, or any evidence to substantiate such claims.  I’d be a millionaire, as TU has been blocking my myFICO reports for YEARS.

I recommend that people with blocked reports write to Trans Union.  Most likely, they’ll get no response or a copy of their credit report from TU, but it helps with legal action to establish what morons they are. 

Of course calling is another option, if you can record and you can handle the aggravation.  Unfortunately, I just can’t deal with it anymore, they are so extraordinarily obnoxious, I’ve never talked to anybody at Trans Union that didn’t make my blood boil. 

So I stick to lawsuits, which is the only way to get them to respond and hopefully find out more.  It sure would help to get some donations for depositions.

Update:

The over 200 inquiries resulted from the ordering consumer disclosures with the intent to get hard inquiries deleted, the TU system can not handle that many inquiries.

1) I have never recommended doing this, it simply makes no sense to spend so much time and effort on trying to get inquiries deleted.  I’ve seen 720+ FICO scores with 20+ hard inquiries.  The inquiries only count for a year and many auto and mortgage inquiries are deduplicated.

Last summer I applied for several credit cards and even with the new accounts, my scores weren’t lowered at all (until I charged up the cards).  Inquiries were a score factor, but I really don’t care whether my score is 751 or 762. 

Inquiries hurt the LOW SCORERS most, that’s how the system is designed.

So rather than trying to get inquiries deleted, work on the real problems and increase the scores.  Of course you can’t do that when you don’t get your FICO report because TU blocks it.

And if inquiries were in fact prematurely deleted, TU can be sued for violating the FCRA.

2) Trans Union sells the consumer disclosures through countless credit monitoring services allowing for daily orders, resulting in those hundreds of consumer disclosure soft inquiries.  If TU’s system cannot handle these inquiries, it should either stop selling through these monitoring services, upgrade its system or get out of the credit reporting business.

Soft inquiries are NOT disclosed on the myFICO reports, so it can’t be a technical problem.

Can CREDITORS get the TU report or is TU taking retaliatory measures to prevent additional consumer disclosure inquiries?

I have had clients check their reports daily because they were trying to buy a house and they were waiting for changes prior to applying for the mortgage and unfortunately many people spend way too much time looking at their credit reports. 

If the CRAs SELL to the monitoring services, they must be able to deliver.

All 3 CRAs have serious problems handling the credit data.  They merge, mix and split files.  They’re too damn cheap to upgrade their systems.

Another update: I didn’t realize that this horrible advice about ordering daily credit reports was still on the web.  It’s been a few years since I’ve had clients with split files due to those hundreds of inquiries.  It’s a way to cause yourself some SERIOUS problems.  Don’t do it.

Friday, April 13, 2007

Bruce Marks offers $1 billion for subprime refis - does nothing to change the corrupt system

Housing activist offers $1b to aid subprime cases

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Apr 12, 2007 - Knight Ridder Tribune Business News
Author(s): Kimberly Blanton
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Apr. 12--Boston housing activist Bruce Marks said yesterday that his organization will provide $1 billion in mortgage refinancing to homeowners nationwide who are struggling with high-cost subprime loans.

Marks is a colorful figure who successfully used guerrilla tactics in the 1990s to pressure major US banks to fund mortgages for low- and middle-income workers. Now subprime lenders will be on the receiving end of his confrontational actions as he promi ed to lead mass protests of borrowers with high-cost mortgages at company headquarters and the homes of their executives because the loans made by those firms were “structured to fail.” “If a lender says we’re not going to work with you, we’re going to foreclose, we will be at the auction, we will be at the CEO’s home. We’ll be there to say we are shutting you down,” said Marks, who once referred to himself as a “bank terrorist.” His two-pronged campaign is aimed at stemming the rising number of foreclosures filed against homeowners, which financial regulators have said are being driven by a proliferation of high-cost subprime mortgages.

Massachusetts, for example, had a record 9,487 foreclosure filings against homeowners last year. Marks earned his reputation in the early 1990s organizing protests and sit-ins of Fleet Finance Group Inc., whose mortgage unit he accused of charging higher rates and fees to minority homeowners who took equity loans against their properties, causing s me in Boston and Georgia to lose their homes. Wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with the slogan “Stop the Loan Sharks,” a bull horn-toting Marks would lead his constituency of protesters into noisy confrontations, once storming Fleet’s annual shareholders’ meeting in downtown Boston.

He also demanded—and got—a meeting with Fleet’s then chief executive Terrence Murray, who committed $140 million to Marks’s organization in 1995 to make loans. Fleet also agreed to pay $100 million in 1996 to settle two class-action suits brought by homeowners in Georgia, and also settled with the US Department of Justice and the state of Georgia, which had launched investigations. Marks subsequently broadened his horizons, eventually getting Bank of America Corp., in two different agreements, to provide a combined $6 billion, and Citigroup to provide $3 billion in mortgage money to his organization, the Neighborhood Assistance Co p. of America, to help moderate-income workers finance home purchases.

In 2002, Marks returned to Fleet, getting another $200 million from the bank. Marks estimated his organization has made about 50,000 home purchase loans over the years, and continues to make new ones; his borrowers typically have incomes of $35,000 to $45,000. Marks’s strategy at the time was aided by a key federal law—the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, which requires banks to lend in minority neighborhoods. By agreeing to fund his organization’s mortgage program, the banks also fulfilled their Commun ty Reinvestment Act requirements. “CRA is the reason he’s effective,” said Thomas Callahan, who runs the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, a Boston organization that subsidizes mortgages for first-time homebuyers with modest incomes.

The mortgage industry is less regulated than banks and not subject to the Community Reinvestment Act. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee in the 1990s, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas called the strategy of Marks and other activists using the federal law to extract funds from financial companies a form of “legalized extortion.” Even without the leverage of a federal law, Marks threatens to be a fearsome antagonist of the subprime lending industry, said those who’ve watched him. “I don’t think anyone wants to be in his sights,” said former Boston Federal Reserve Bank president Richard Syron, who now runs Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored corporation that buys mortgages from lenders to support home ownership.

Indeed, Kevin Cuff, executive director of the Massachusetts Mortgage Bankers Association, said: “Bruce Marks can be an effective and a dangerous guy, and I’m not interested in inciting him to picket one of my members’ houses.” Marks continues to have a ready army to deploy against the subprime lending industry: As a condition of receiving a loan from his organization, borrowers are required to participate in housing activism in their communities. Marks will redirect $1 billion of the home-purchase mortgage funds from Bank of America and Citigroup into refinancing the subprime mortgages of about 7,000 homeowners.

The typical subprime loan carries a low introductory teaser interest rate that incre ses to double-digits after two years, driving up monthly payments by hundreds of dollars. Those loans would be replaced with traditional 30-year fixed-rate mortgages at the below-market levels Marks’s organization charges its current borrowers—now 5.625 percent. The new loans will be available to working people with a subprime mortgage, w ether they are in foreclosure or not. As for his own organization’s lending record, Marks said the number of foreclosures on NACA customers is “virtually none”—less than one-quarter of 1 percent.

Subprime mortgages exploded in popularity during the housing boom earlier this decade. Critics of subprime loans, including regulators, contend that lenders relaxed standards and made loans to borrowers who could not afford to buy homes in the first pla e, especially in such expensive real estate markets as Boston. As many as 2.2 million Americans with subprime loans have lost or will lose their homes because of mortgages that they cannot afford , according to the Center for Responsible Lending in North Carolina. Marks’s organization may currently be the largest source of financial relief for these troubled borrowers as lawmakers on Beacon Hill and Capitol Hill hold hearings on the issue.

Representative Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Comm ttee, which plans hearings next week, said the Neighborhood Assistance Corp.’s loan program would be “helpful. You can’t simply retroactively undo this by law.” Marks, meanwhile, said he would not focus protests on any one lender but would pressure all the major lenders, including the subprime subsidiaries of such banking giants as Wells Fargo amp; Co. and HSBC. Spokesmen for both banks yesterday said their organizations engage in “responsible subprime lending.” Subprime lending is one “reason why homeownership for African-Americans and Hispanics has risen faster” than others, said Jay Lawrence, spokesman for Wells Fargo, where 8 percent of $397 billion mortgages made last year were subprime loans.

I’ve been following Bruce Marks and http://www.naca.com (don’t confuse them with NACA.net, the lawyers) for years and I even signed up for one of their campaigns back in 2001, but I didn’t get a response to my email.

Unfortunately, NACA is NOT addressing the real problems:

1) MOST people end up with subprime mortgages because their FICO credit scores are ARTIFICIALLY low due to incorrect credit reporting and the defective FICO scoring formula.

2) Loan agents LIE to borrowers about the terms and the regulators REFUSE to investigate complaints about unethical and illegal mortgage solicitations and loan agents’ misconduct.

If I had the money and knew HOW to accomplish it, I’d subpoena records re. my ignored complaints with the California Department of Real Estate and I’d depose the DRE “investigators” who chose to IGNORE my complaints about scummy lenders.

Bruce Marks HAS the money to address the real issues, but instead, he’ll spend $6 billions to refi borrowers out of subprime loans.

Some of the $$$ go to the subprime lenders who would otherwise LOSE $$$ when foreclosing on homes with 100% financing.

Actually, they usually lose money when foreclosing on loans with 80% LTVs, since the loans are often over 6 months delinquent and you have the costs of sale, fixing up the property and holding it.  So he’s mitigating the subprime lenders’ losses.  NICE! 

I’d rather see the money spent on getting homeowners into another house, let the subprime lenders suffer the losses.  Of course each home and borrower have to be evaluated individually and it does take skills to determine the real market value of a house and to correctly assess the homeowner’s credit rating - is it worth giving them a new loan to prevent a foreclosure on their record or is their credit rating shot already?

Is it a solid house or were they screwed by their Realtor too?

Did they have the funds to maintain the home or is it rotting because they haven’t had the cash to fix the leaking roof? 

And of course there are other considerations too, everyone’s situation is different.  I just don’t understand how one can ignore the issues and decide to spend so much money to accomplish nothing. 

There ARE people who will never be able to survive without being bailed out and taken care of by organizations like NACA, but at least a few Americans have the brains to learn how to read their credit reports and how to evaluate a truthful mortgage quote. 

Right?  ???

Maybe that’s the billion dollar question:

Is the average American mentally incapable of understanding adjustable rate mortgages and interest rates when properly explained?

It bites that NACA has so much money and won’t do a thing to fix the real problems. 

As I’ve been looking for a mortgage, even I can’t get the terms.  When I asked for the interest rate and terms, I received a faxed payment schedule for an ARM starting with 1% payments.  I still have no idea what the interest rate is.  It’s been 5 weeks now since they ran my credit and I haven’t even received the Good Faith Estimate or any disclosure.

I have a written approval, but the agent didn’t even ask me about my income or employment.

He wanted my authorization to order the appraisal and when I didn’t give it, he dumped me.

The real reasons for the subprime lending crisis—credit reporting, FICO scoring, lying loan agents and the corruption of the regulators—will definitely be part of my book.  Considering my suits against Ameriquest, First Magnus, Bridge Capital, Central Pacific and now Dana Capital, I have enough documentation to write a book just about the subprime lending crisis.

My 8/26/05 posting is quite relevant, it describes the 1% payment loan that was recently offered to me:

Housing sales slowing down - house-poor Californians - mortgage fraud rampant

So I’m sending this URL to , unfortunately there’s no contact info for Bruce Marks and I don’t expect a reply.

UPDATE 12/20/07:

I didn’t receive a response to my email.  But a NACA employee contacted me and agreed that the agenda is NOT to change the corrupt system.

Currently a client is expecting to close a NACA refi soon.  It seems that NACA is very much in line with President Bush’s bailout program, designed to protect the LENDERS.