Op-Ed: Scum to the rescue – 'Foreclosure rescue companies' are rip offs

Just when you thought the level of disgusting behavior and stupidity couldn’t get worse, comes a new scam taking money off people being foreclosed. Lenders are creating more opportunities for ripoffs as they foreclose mindlessly on anything and anyone.

Bogus companies claiming to be able to stop foreclosures rip off people and tell them everything’s OK. They just take the money and do nothing. The trick is partly marketing, partly desperation, and partly, from the sound of the various stories, the insanity of lenders. Despair is making people turn to any possible way out, and that’s all that’s needed to get the parasites into business. The lenders, however, the same geniuses that brought us the meltdown, are the real source of the problem. Not content with destroying the US economy and a generation or two of home buyers, they've created a sure fire mechanism to prevent the housing industry from reviving any time soon. Try this for great business practice, though, on the part of the lenders: 1. They lent at top market prices and good rates, well above the Fed rates. 2. When the bottom dropped out of the market, and credit got tight, the lenders, instead of allowing people to pay what they could, still based on the old prices, jacked up their interest rates. 3. By doing that, they lost a large number of people who were still paying, just when they needed cashflow. 4. They’ve now lumbered themselves with huge portfolios of properties they have no hope of selling, and they’re still foreclosing on people who are trying to pay. 5. The value of the repayments they’ve already foregone in the course of kicking people out of their houses would by now be well into the billions. 6. They still want handouts, Interest Rates For Infants, and their hands held by whoever’s printing the money. 7. They're still foreclosing, shutting down whole cities. The property lenders belong in shelters for people who are mentally incapable of managing their own affairs. These guys couldn’t manage a corn flake, and they can prove it. The scam artists, however, are in plague numbers, and appear to be doing just fine. They seem to have pretty low odds of getting caught, and their credit ratings probably won’t be permanently trashed if they are. Apparently these are the same “people” who appeared as refinance agencies when things got rough in the housing market in late 2007. As usual, a great job of demolishing the people acting legally has been done, while the criminals and Manhattan’s answer to Night Of The Living Dead pretend to be somebodies. The New York Times

Often the scammers represent themselves as having connections to government groups, or copy the name and typography of the Hope Now program, an alliance of nonprofit, government and lending agencies, said Marietta Rodriguez, director of national homeownership programs at NeighborWorks America, a nonprofit group that provides free government-certified foreclosure counseling through 235 local organizations.

“Several took the Hope Now Web site and just reskinned it with their own information, or they use government seals,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “They’re very crafty, and their marketing strategies are aggressive.”

The moral of the story: trust nobody, borrow nothing, and find a nice tree to live in.