Ameriquest Mortgage Company X-Employee gives the inside scoop, FRAUD, DESCEPTION, FORGERY Novi, Waterford Michigan/California...
I have just finished reading the horrible horror stories that some of you have entered about your dealings with Ameriquest Mortgage Company and since seeing Mark's post from the Grand Rapids office I think it only fair to let the people whom have been harmed by Ameriquest the inside scoop about how the organization really works. I was an Ameriquest employee until I realized what I was doing to people since then I have left and found a line of work that allows me to help people and in some respects (I hope) undo some of the karma damage that I bestowed upon people while working for Ameriquest.
Training:
Ameriquest does not train any of their employees at all. All new employees are sat in front of a TV screen and shown video cassetts of motivational speakers saying close that loan close that loan without every explaining how to do a purchase, fixed, ARM or what an appraisal is and God forbid Title insurance. After the five days of being brainwashed by their Corporate Sponsor they set you to the phone which is basically telemarketing AKA targeting low income, ethnic, with sporatic employment. This is what Ameriquest calls the "cream of the crop" Now remember that when you sign up with these people nine times out of ten your loan officer will have never done a loan or have done very few and does not know what is going on because 1. No training 2. Ameriquest likes to keep it's people in the dark because they do not want them to know what harm they are doing.
APPRAISALS:
I wanted to touch on how Ameriquest handles appraisals the increase their values tremendously becuase I see Mark's post about Fraud in Grand Rapids Michigan and feel that I should eleborate on this. Ameriquest works with very few appraisers whom they know they can control and offer kickbacks to them in the form of increased business or cash incentives in order to inrease the value of a house. I have seen this happen before. What this does is it increases the Loan to Value LTV they can give a customer on their house. Well the problem comes in when Ameriquest sometimes doubles the appraisals. If your house is work 100K and you have an appraisal is 200K; you get a loan for 75% LTV you borrowed 150K on a 100K house; basically that means that the person is trapped in their house forever; they can never sell it or if they do you they have to come up with an additional 50K to leave. Ameriquest does this as policy and teaches their branch managers how to do this. Upper management regularly gives pep talks and advice to Managers on how to coerce appraisers into doing this.
DESCEPTION:
Many of you have refered to the fact that all of documents and figures where different when you went to close your loans; well thats becauase employees of Ameriquest are taught to do this from day one. The trick (from my X-manager) is to trick them into getting deal, string them along for a little while until their mortgage payment comes due, then raise the rate and points, closing costs etc. It is very common for a loan with Ameriquest to be underwritten hours if not minutes before a customer (sucker) shows up to sign. This happens all the time and again nine times out of ten your loan officer was not trained properly or the underwriter was not getting paid enough (they make a percentage as well) so they decide to jack up the rates or the points. It was not uncommon for a 7.5% (Ameriquests best rate) with 3.5 pts to become a 11.66 with 6 points. Also we were taught by our X-manger about the HUD arm, this is on the form called the Housing Urban Development (HUD) form which lays out the fees on one side of the form to cover up the fees so that the customer did not know how much they paid for their loan.
Forgery:
On our second day at Ameriquest in middle of our motivational video cassettes our manager took us aside and quitly informed us that part of our job at Ameriquest was to "fix" the mistakes made by Notary's and the processors. This was called the "ART" department. She then went into an in depth explanation on how to FORGE DOCUMENTS we were showns how to acurately copy and trace a customers siganture onto document. We were told to create letters of Estopple, to add signatures and to add initials. When an employee of Ameriquest did not want to do this he was quieltly escorted into a small room and told that "there was the door" and if he didn't like it he could leave. The frightening thing was that this X-manager of ours knew how do forge everything and very well too, down to getting the smudge marks from the copier to show up correctly so that it didnt' look like forgery. If you had a loan with Ameriquest, there is a good chance that your closing docs have incorrect or forged signatures on them.
Note to other Mortgage Professionals:
Ameriquest will not allow an employee to EVER price a loan below 105.5% and that officer makes next to nothing on it. If a loan had 14,000 in closing cost the officer may make $800 at best.
To all of you that have heard of, are working with will work with Ameriquest: RUN
To all of you that we have hurt: We are sorry, good luck
Truth
Farmington Hills, Michigan
U.S.A.
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