You Can Bank On It

Folks are poring over the release of Bank of America emails today by hacker group Anonymous detailing what the group is claiming as mortgage fraud.  Forbes' Hayah Touryalai takes a look at the correspondence between mortgage subsidiary Balboa Insurance and BofA.

It seems like the actual internal emails in the Anonymous release are between Balboa Insurance employees and BofA employees, but tough to tell if there’s anything truly damning in the e-mails.

The informant tells Anonymous that he has emails revealing BofA’s order to mismatch loan numbers from their documents in order to foreclose on homeowners. Read the leaked Bank of America e-mails here.

The release from Anonymous (which is unrelated to WikiLeaks but is a supporter of the organization) comes about 4 months after WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange told Forbes he had troves of data that could take down Bank of America.

Last month it was revealed that Assange wasn’t sure about the negative impact of his BofA goods saying he isn’t sure the data he has on BofA contains any scandal, and that the material was not self-explanatory to the extent that he himself could not make any sense of it.

Bank of America has had months of warnings of about the possibility of a damaging leak, but so far the threats have yet to hurt its share price. Since late November when Forbes reported on the BofA megaleak from WikiLeaks, the bank’s shares have soared 27%.

We'll see how it goes.   Tyler Durden's take at Zero Hedge is a little less laconic:

The punchline is that this appears to be a concerted effort from the ground up to hide foreclosure data from auditors and the Fed in order to obtain select preferential treatment in a variety of housing related axes, in many instances to accelerate foreclosures.

As the whistleblower summarizes: "Balboa Insurance/Countrywide knowingly hiding foreclosure information from federal auditors during the federal takeovers of IndyMac Federal (a subsidiary of OneWest) and Aurora Loan Services (a subsidiary of Lehman Bros Holdings), falsifying loan documentation in order to proceed with foreclosures by fixing letter cycles in the system, reporting incorrect volumes to all of their lenders and to the federal auditors to avoid fines for falling behind on Loan Modifications, purposefully and knowingly adjusting premiums for REO insurance for their corporate clients while denying forebearances for individual borrowers, etc, etc, etc. In addition, if anyone can get me a copy of the image of the hard drive that Jullian Assange reportedly has from the BofA executive, it will not take a dozen financial analysis to decipher it like I've read in the news. I could find all the dirt on that hard drive within a week."

We'll see.  This could be nothing, or it could be the start of something large and ugly.  But will the federal government act upon it even if it is?  Doubtful at best.