In 1999, my husband and i received a letter from our mortgage company (Option One) that our mortgage had been transferred to Ocwen Federal Bank.
In 2000 we received a letter from ocwen stating that we were behind in our mortgage and we would need to contact them immediately. We tried for several weeks and had no luck contacting them or having them return calls. We received a letter in the mail that said they had put us on a forbearance plan that increased our payments. I called them and they told me I had to send the down payment to them immediately or they were going to foreclose on our house. I asked them if the down payment would make up the late payments and they told me yes. They also told me after one year I would be caught up with the payments and things would go back to the regular payment. So we paid the down payment which was a large sum.
I continued to receive letters about late fees and so on. So I called them again and I couldn't get a response so I called the lady that I had talked to at their lawyers moss... She told me to just ignore the statements and things would go back to normal in one year. So I ignored the statements and the year rolled around and they sent me another forbearance plan and wanted $3500.00 down payment.
I had never been late on the forbearance plan and I western union every month and I have all receipts. They told me if I didn't pay the $3500.00 they would forclose on us. So again we paid it and when I asked about the late fees they ignored me.
So I decided it was not worth all the money they were charging us to save our house, so I stopped paying their crazy fees and payments that never changed the balance of our account. The account only rose higher no matter how much money we sent.
Finally we had a friend that found out what was happening and told us he would pay our house off. We called for a pay off and it took them six months to give us a pay off. This was only after we called everyone we could to report them for an untimely pay off.
Our friend and my husband went to Orlando to pay off the house, they were suppose to have an appointment but when they arrived they talked to some lady with two armed guards and lots of locked doors around them. My husband said it was like a fortress. Finally a man came out and did not know what to do about our pay off. But they had sent us a letter and I saved everything from them that gave the payoff amount, so the man accepted the pay off and at this time our house was in foreclosure and we had not been contacted the first time about it.
We called for several weeks and then months to get their name taken off the house at the courthouse. They finally sent me a letter stating it had been released.
And when I thought everything was over with Ocwen. We filled our income taxes for 2003 and received a small refund. Then in 2004 the IRS contacted us to tell us our earnings did not match, because Ocwen had filed a misc 1099 that stated a loss to their business and the IRS wanted us to pay the difference which was a significant amount.
Thank God I kept all those papers from their company, I had to send copies of everything to them to get that cleared up. I still had the letter where they had settled with a pay off and I sent it to the IRS and that settled that. This took another year.
We have been charged with bogus late fees, forebearance plans, down payments, unpaid mortgage taxed that were being deducted, and everything you can imagine.
Thank goodness we had a friend to get us out of this mess.
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