Voice of the People
By: Ronald D Ellis
Ocwen, Allegations of Fraud, Malice, Misrepresentation and Manipulation: Part II
Ocwen Financial Corporation ("Ocwen") is a vertically integrated multi-billion dollar, publicly traded (NYSE: OCN) financial services holding company, engaged in a variety of businesses related to mortgage servicing, real estate asset management, asset recovery and technology. Headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida,
This is the second in a series of stories about this company, Ocwen services sub-prime mortgages. This means they service mortgages for people that have had trouble paying their bills in the past. And Ocwen services a lot of these, nearly 400,000 customers.
As part of this investigation we decided to review a typical Ocwen customer, and a not so typical Ocwen customer. We will call them Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones (these are real Ocwen customers) who have ask to not be identified because of pending legal action.in our first story we presented Mr. Smith story, now we are reporting on Mr. Jones a most unusual Ocwen customer.
Mr. Jones has been an Ocwen customer for 26 months, all payments were automatically withdrawn on a biweekly basis from his checking account, 6 months ago Ocwen sent him a notice that he was $1750 behind on his house payments and he had been placed into a forbearance plan in order to get his account current.
Mr. Jones ask for and received an account history, it was a mass of errors. Many payments that came directly from his checking account were not credited to his house payment, in fact over half the payments he had made automatically were sent to a suspense account and several others went to a home owner's insurance policy that had been forced place by Ocwen without ever notifying Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jones sent numerous letters and phone calls trying to resolve the situation and was not able to prevent Ocwen from starting foreclosure on his home and has been forced to file for bankruptcy in order to keep his home. During this time Mr. Jones continued to make payments via automatic payments and Ocwen continued to misapply the payments, and began adding other fees such as attorneys and late fees.
We want to be clear here, Ocwen is foreclosing on a homeowner that had never missed a payment, who had current insurance and had setup automatic payments so their could be no debate on Ocwen receiving them. This reporter was on a call with Mr. Jones during which the only Ocwen employee Mr. Jones was able to speak to confirmed that Ocwen is not treating its customers fairly with respect to payments.
Mr. Jones has filed suit against Ocwen for a number of different issues.
Our research has revealed some shocking statitics about Ocwen and we feel this should be shared with our readers.
1.in a recent story in the South Florida Business Journal Ocwen representative Paul Koches claimed the company was facing 331 law suits. That statement is not accurate currently there are almost 500 cases filed in Federal Court @source PACER.net. According to an internal source Ocwen considers the 331 cases identified by the South Florida Business Journal as cases of interest.
2. Currently there are almost 28,000 total cases in which Ocwen is involved that are filed in Circuit Courts thought the US @source PACER.net.
3. Currently between 10 to 100 new law suits per month are being filed against Ocwen.
4. Currently an Ocwen subsidiary in Canada has the same business model and posted $1 Billion in total revenue.
5. A site know as usacomplaints.com has almost 1150 postings about Ocwen, yet direct contact with the Manager of the site reveals that over 27,000 have been submitted that could not be posted because of the language and or threats that were contained in the postings. Current and former employees have confirmed that if they are identified as visiting this site they can be terminated.
6. Mr. Ronald M Faris President of Ocwen worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), PWC is now Ocwen financial audit firm, Mr. Faris has $18M in stock in the company. PWC could not be reached for comment.
We have contacted Ocwen and have not received any comment on the two stories we have posted about the company.
0 comments