Why it is legal for Bank of America to charge us for Lender Placed Flood Insurance that is back dated? When we can not purchase back dated insurance through the existing flood policy we have through the National Flood Insurance Program to comply with Bank of America's demands.
Bank of America has extorted $31.03 from us. We were forced to use them for our mortgage company when Countrywide Home Loans failed.
Bank of America's flood insurance requirements apparently are higher than Countrywide's or FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program. And since they are using this to extort money from their newly acquired customers; they do not notify the new customers that they have this higher requirement.
The problem occurred when we purchased a higher replacement cost home insurance policy. Our home insurance policy expires January 29 and our flood insurance policy expires on June 29 every year. We have never missed or been late on paying either. We even exceeded the NFIP's guidelines using the higher replacement cost valve figured on the new policy.
We received a letter from Bank of America dated 02/17/10 claiming we owed additional flood insurance. We purchased the additional amount of insurance from Hartford 02/26/10 at a cost of $8 for 93 days (3/28/10 to 6/29/10) verses $31.03 for 57 days (1/29/10 to 3/27/10). And please note that from the date they wrote the letter until the date I paid for the additional coverage is only nine days. The letter was not sent next day delivery it was sent regular mail. So we took care of this in a timely manner.
Bank of America's letter instructed us to purchase the additional coverage for the period of 1/29/10 to 1/29 by 4/7/10. They knew we have our flood insurance through the NFIP with Hartford Insurance. They should know it is illegal to back date the additional insurance on our existing policy and knew we would have to wait 30 days for the additional insurance to take effect since that is a requirement of the NFIP that Hartford Insurance has to comply with. Also, they knew our flood insurance policy wouldn't expire until June 29,10. Why would Bank of America require us to change the normal expiration date of our existing flood policy?
Also they knew they could extort the cost of the back dated coverage since they can conveniently get backdated coverage through their private insurance company and we can not with the existing NFIP policy we held. And we are sure they were probably hoping we would wait until the 4/7/10 deadline they gave us to comply so they could extort more money from us.
I'm appalled that the WYO is being used to scam innocent people like us. We have always paid our payments on time. We usually chose the upgrades in the Flood Insurance when offered, until this year. We would like to show FEMA just how we feel about them contributing to Bank of America's scam by never paying the upgrade cost of a flood policy again. We'll also never accept an offer for more replacement cost home coverage at a lower cost again or at least not as long as we have Bank of America as our mortgage company. So if it was FEMA, NFIP, and Bank of America's intention to create distrust and lose revenue then they have succeeded.
FEMA and the NFIP were right to hold all the participating insurance companies to high standards so policies would be honest and fair; so why let banks scam people with the WYO, who use the very fact that NFIP flood policy holders are held to rules that make it impossible to protect themselves from the money making schemes created by these greedy banks like Bank of America?
Please stop banks from using this practice. We would like to have faith in our country and its programs like FEMA and the NFIP, but it is hard when they give power of this kind to a greedy bank to use in this manner. Don't let Bank of America or any other banks get away with this kind of extortion.
0 comments