SHOCKER!!   Buyer of a short sale doesn’t own the property he just purchased (or does he?).  Seller of the short sale paid off the wrong party (or did he?).

The below email was sent to Neil Garfield at Living Lies.  Sadly this is not shocking at we know of two other lawsuits where the seller and the buyer acted in good faith and sold the property and the money was sent to BofA (and MERS was involved as well) and later the “real” owner of the deed of trust came forward and demanded that the transaction be undone due to a mistaken release of the deed of trust by the wrong party.

What does this mean to a real estate agent involved in the transaction?

Get an attorney involved – preferably BEFORE the short sale closes.  Why?  Quite simply you need to make sure that the transaction is buttoned up tight.   Many of the short sales that involve an attorney and litigation against the pretender lender will require a settlement agreement to be signed at closing (or at least have enough documentation that the seller & buyer have some ground to stand on).

But what does a settlement agreement do and how does it help you as the real estate agent?

First, the pretender lender whose is receiving the proceeds of the short sale “swears” they are the real lender or working for the real lender (like Fannie Mae).  Second, a well crafted settlement agreement will indemnify the seller (or whichever parties are named) – meaning that the lender getting the money has to defend the seller if they are sued over the specifics related to the settlement, i.e. the short sale.

Does the buyer lose the house and does the real estate agent have to give back their commission?

Very likely the answer is no.  But you will have to hire an attorney to fight this battle for you.   The title company should be on the hook for the value of the home – meaning they will either have to pay off the “real” lender or the new homeowner.   The downside is that it could cost more than the commission just to fight this type of suit AND the title insurance is only good for the amount of the policy (if the house was bought for less than full value or thousands of dollars in updates/remodeling has been performed you could lose this amount).

Bottom Line

Short sales and even purchasing foreclosure can be great equity and value builders for the buyers and assist the seller with disposing of a property but a good title company and good lawyer can help you keep this value hopefully keep your sanity and commission.

Seek legal counsel from a real estate attorney and one who has experience in dealing with short sale and foreclosure.

- The Bank Slayer

Talk about a title NIGHTMARE.  As you will see below in a blurb from April Charney, a large national servicer (U.S. Mortgage) STOLE mortgages belonging to credit unions for which they were servicing the Notes.  ($142 million worth of loans!!!).

U.S. Mortgage sold the loans to Fannie Mae and kept all the money but kept sending the mortgage payments to the credit unions and Fannie Mae so no one ever knew.  Eventually after stealing the loans and selling to a very aggressive Fannie Mae as purchaser, the servicer went bankrupt.   The credit unions moved to service the loans themselves or transfer them to another servicer and found out the servicer had stolen their loans and sold them.

In the case below a specific credit union wants the loans back but Fannie already sold them into the securities market and/or doesn’t want to give them up AND wants the mortgage payments sent to them.

The credit union’s beef with Fannie is that Fannie audited U.S. Mortgage each year and blessed their internal processes but when buying the loan failed to always secure the original notes AND the property records only show the credit union’s deed of trust and NO ASSIGNMENT from the credit union to the servicer or anyone else.  Hence, the loan still belonged to the credit union.

Among some of the fascinating elements in the case is one in which employees at the servicer even produced fake promissory notes and signed blue ink pretending to be the borrower when on occasion Fannie actually asked for the original notes.

This is a good example of the lies and theft going on behind closed doors.

- The Bank Slayer

From: April Charney [April.Charney@jaxlegalaid.org]

SUFFOLK FEDERAL CREDIT UNION,
Plaintiff,
vs.
FEDERAL NATIONAL MORTGAGE
ASSOCIATION
Defendant

Case 2:10-cv-02763-GEB

In 2009, “Suffolk learned that U.S. Mortgage ha[d] stolen 189 of the mortgage loans it was servicing (the “Stolen Mortgages”), worth more than $42 million2 and sold them to Fannie Mae.” (Id. at ¶ 7.) Suffolk states in its Complaint that “McGrath and another U.S. Mortgage employee, Ron Carti, had prepared and signed loan transfer documents that falsely identified themselves as executives of Suffolk” and that “Fannie Mae accepted the documents and paid U.S. Mortgage millions of dollars without ever checking into McGrath’s or Carti’s authority to execute loan transfer documents on behalf of Suffolk.” (Id. at ¶ 7.)

The theft of the Stolen Mortgages occurred throughout years 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009, during which time “U.S. Mortgage officers and employees . . . selected loans that Suffolk had instructed CU National to retain in Suffolk’s portfolio and . . . sold those loans to Fannie Mae without Suffolk’s knowledge or authorization.” (Id. at ¶ 39.) “U.S. Mortgage sold the Stolen Mortgages to Fannie Mae by having McGrath and Carti execute the documentation themselves” despite the fact that only authorized Suffolk employees had authority to sign these documents. (Id. at ¶ 41.) Neither McGrath nor Carti had the authority to execute these documents. (Id. at ¶¶ 71-77.)

In addition, U.S. Mortgage “concealed its actions from Suffolk . . . for years by continuing to make monthly payments on the stolen mortgages as if they remained in [Suffolk's] portfolio[].” (Id. at ¶ 9.) “McGrath has already pleaded guilty to crimes in connection with his unauthorized sales of the Stolen Mortgages and, in doing so, had admitted that he and Carti executed loan transfer documents purportedly on Suffolk’s behalf without Suffolk’s authorization.” (Id. at ¶ 48.)

McGrath also admitted that “he did not always deliver an authentic original note to Fannie Mae in his unauthorized sales” and that in some cases “he forged the name of the borrower on a newly created note” and in others “he had color copies of notes made and delivered a copy of the note to Fannie Mae.” (Id. at 51.)

(Paragraph 42 of the Complaint states that the Stolen Mortgages were worth more than $142 million. (Compl. ¶ 42; Doc. No. 1.))

If facing foreclosure, don’t just give up.  Fight for your rights.

“Citigroup paid almost $82,000 in opponents’ legal costs when settling challenges to four bankruptcy claims that used Orion letters in 2010, according to agreements filed with federal bankruptcy courts in New York and Arkansas. The bank reduced interest rates on the remaining debt by an average of 49 percent, while cutting the outstanding mortgage balance in three cases by a combined $55,000, the filings show.”

– The Bank Slayer

“We are deeply appreciative of those who fight to protect our country and Chase funds a number of programs that provide benefits to military personnel and veterans, and while any customer mistake is regrettable, we feel particularly badly about the mistakes we made here,” Chase chief communications officer Kristin Lemkau said in a statement to NBC News.

She said that beginning this week Chase will be mailing a total of about $2 million in refunds to families that may have been overcharged. She says most of the families improperly foreclosed on have gotten or will get their homes back. A bank official described what happened here as “grim,” but emphasized the mistakes were inadvertent, not malicious.

The news comes as millions of Americans are struggling to keep their homes. Banks have come under fire for allegedly improperly foreclosing on homes across the country.

JP Morgan Chase had over $2.14 trillion in total assets as of September, second only to Bank of America Corp., which had $2.34 trillion.

The overcharges may never have come to light but for Rowles, 31, and his wife, Julia.

“It’s been a nightmare. It’s been my living nightmare,” Julia Rowles said of her experience with Chase, in an interview with NBC News in Beaufort, S.C.

The saga began in 2006 when Rowles went on active duty. Under the SCRA, he could get his mortgage interest rate, which was adjustable and rising, lowered to 6 percent.

But Chase took a few months to lower Rowles’ rate, overcharging the family, Rowles says, by as much as $900 a month. In the fall of 2006, Chase finally began charging Rowles the correct 6 percent rate. For the next year or so, everything went relatively smoothly.

Then, two years ago, the Rowles family says, Chase began hitting them with collection calls that escalated to sometimes three a day, claiming they owed as much as $15,000.

“Saturday, Sundays, middle of the night. It did not matter if it was a holiday,” Julia said. “Collection calls at 3 in the morning. He would state, “I’m in California. I’m stationed here in  Miramar. It’s 3 in the morning. What are you doing calling me?” “Well, sir, this is an attempt to collect a debt.”

She said they threatened to take the house and report the family to a credit agency, even though the Rowles family didn’t owe the bank anything and never missed a payment.

The Rowles’ records show that while they kept making payments on their mortgage at 6 percent, the bank wrongly had been charging them at rates above 9 or 10 percent. They kept calling the bank to explain there had been a huge mistake but say no one would listen. They say they kept being harassed for money they did not owe.

Fed up, Capt. Rowles got a lawyer and sued Chase, for himself and other members of the military.

“They ought to only have to worry about fighting the fight and keeping alive, not about whether their wives and children and going to be put out on the street,” said Dick Harpootlian, an attorney for the Rowles family.

The lawsuit is still pending. But a Chase official now tells NBC that Rowles did everything right, and the bank did a lot wrong. (The bank maintains, however, that it previously refunded the initial overcharges of the Rowles family. The couple disputes that.)

“We made mistakes here and we are fixing them,” said Chase spokeswoman Lemkau.

Taking someone’s money with no intention of performing any service or delivering a product  is not only unethical but in mose cases illegal.

Last month the Attorney General of Arizona decided that enough is enough.  Bank of America has simply been stealing money from unsuspecting homeowners.  Not only are they stealing money but they are tricking them into believing they are making progress or “buying” their way to a loan mod.

Time and time again we see these large banks or mortgage servicers duping homeowners into paying for something they are not getting.  If a borrower makes payments under the auspices of a modification plan that is given and orchestrated by the lender there should be a clear outcome and the plan should be according to clearly understood rules.

If you never intended to give the homeowners a loan modification then just come out and tell them versus leading them on for months while taking their hard earned money which you don’t apply to principle but just fees.   Sickening.

If you or someone you know has dutifully made payments to their mortgage company yet fell victim to this bank scam please contact our office immediately.  713-595-8200

Below is the official press release.

- The Bank Slayer

Bank of America Corp. violated Arizona’s consumer fraud law by misleading consumers trying to get home loan modifications, state Attorney General Terry Goddard said Friday as he filed a civil lawsuit against the bank.

The bank also violated the terms of a 2009 consent agreement it signed requiring the bank’s Countrywide mortgage subsidiary to implement a loan modification program, Goddard said.

Hundreds of homeowners kept making their mortgage payments because Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America repeatedly assured them their loan was being modified, he said. Instead, many lost their homes anyway.

“Those people could have used that money for something else,” Goddard said. “They were deceived into continuing to make mortgage payments when they had no hope of saving their homes.”

The attorney general’s office was deluged with consumer complaints and launched an investigation more than a year ago, Goddard said. Settlement talks with the bank that began in April ultimately collapsed Thursday.

Calls seeking comment from Bank of America were not immediately returned.

The lawsuit, filed in Maricopa County Superior Court, alleges that the bank has repeatedly violated terms of the consent agreement. The pact was expected to lead to loan modifications for thousands of Countrywide customers in Arizona, which had the nation’s fourth- highest foreclosure rate last month, according to RealtyTrac Inc. But the company failed to make   timely decisions on modification requests and went ahead with foreclosures, Goddard said.

Goddard said Nevada is expected to file a similar lawsuit later Friday.

Andy Greenberg in Forbes says that WikiLeaks will soon “release a ‘megaleak’ regarding a major U.S. bank.”

Based upon an interview that occurred last year, the founder of WikiLeaks stated that “we are sitting on five gigabytes from Bank of America, one of the executive’s hard drives.”

With the robo-signer scandal fresh in the press and the mortgage crisis still in full swing it will be interesting to see exactly what WikiLeaks actually has to “leak.”

As soon as we can get our hands on it we’ll post it here.

– The Bank Slayer

Exclusive: WikiLeaks Will Unveil Major Bank Scandal

When I spoke with WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange earlier this month, he told me that in early 2011, the whistleblower site would release a “megaleak” regarding a major U.S. bank. That release, Assange said, would include tens of thousands of its documents that reveal some sort of unethical behavior. No details on the name or what sort of bad behavior would be exposed.

Now an eagle-eyed reader has sent me a link to a quote from a Computer World interview with Assange from October of 2009, which, if true, may contain a clue to that bank’s identity:

“At the moment, for example, we are sitting on five gigabytes from Bank of America, one of the executive’s hard drives,” he said. “Now how do we present that? It’s a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it.”

I’ve contacted WikiLeaks for confirmation but haven’t immediately received a response–its staff is likely tied up by the fallout of its release of a quarter million diplomatic cables, and by the second of two cyberattacks to strike its website in the last few days. Bank Of America didn’t respond to a request for comment either.

If Assange does plan to release the five gigabytes of data he referenced in the Computer World interview, it’s very plausible that he’s been sitting on it for more than a year. As he’s quoted saying at the time, a full five gigabyte of documents was likely beyond the scope of WikiLeaks’ resources at the time to filter, organize, and publish. Today, compared with the 392,000 Iraq war documents the site dumped in October and the millions of diplomatic documents that WikiLeaks has promised to eventually release, it would be fairly standard.

There’s no telling what might be revealed in any Bank of America documents–if Assange does indeed have them–but it could be old news. By the time of publication, the documents would be more than 14 months old. And, as much as any bank on Wall Street, BoA has been scrutinized in recent years by everyone from plaintiffs’ attorneys in class-action investor suits to the New York Attorney General’s office.

And why would Assange hold onto the documents for so long before publishing them? He’s said he simply has too much material.

Here’s a key excerpt of that interview:

Assange: If you think about it, we have a publishing pipeline that’s increasing linearly, and an exponential number of leaks, so we’re in a position where we have to prioritize our resources so that the biggest impact stuff gets released first.

Me: So do you have very high impact corporate stuff to release then?

Assange: Yes, but maybe not as high impact…I mean, it could take down a bank or two.

Me: That sounds like high impact.

Assange: But not as big an impact as the history of a whole war. But it depends on how you measure these things.

To be clear, there’s no clear confirmation that the upcoming release will focus on Bank of America. Assange told me that he had unpublished, potentially damaging documents on multiple finance firms, beyond the bank “megaleak” that we discussed. I’ll provide an update if I can learn more.

A frequent question we get is, “What about my mortgage insurance?”

There exists a general perception that MIP (mortgage insurance premiums) paid either all up front (or monthly) somehow covers your loan like GAP insurance protects you on a car loan.  This is wrong.

Mortgage insurance was created to:

a) Make money for the mortgage insurance company (like all insurance products)

b) Protect the lender of your loan in case you don’t pay.

That seems reasonable.  Like is auto & home insurance, right?

Mortgage Insurance is different.

There are many varieties of this kind of insurance but in a nutshell if you go into default and are trying to pull off a short sale or simply go to foreclosure, your mortgage company is going to seek money from the mortgage insurance company, to which you were making monthly (or one time upfront) payments.

So far that makes some sense.  If the mortgage insurance company pays part or all of the loss that would seem to help reduce your exposure to a deficiency lawsuit for the bank’s loss.

Guess what, the dirty little secret is it will not help you.  The mortgage insurance company can come after you for their loss!!   And the mortgage company can too!

Double dipping on the homeowner.

It seems unfair but it is true.  Your mortgage company AND the mortgage insurance company can hit you up for money.   One of the agreements you signed at most closings is a deed of trust (commonly called a mortgage).  This is not the DEED to your home but the document used to secure the loan against your home.  In other words, it outlines what happens if you don’t pay off the promissory note.

In most cases in contains language that allow the lender to collect on items such as mortgage insurance and simply pocket the money.  Bet ya didn’t know that huh?  Nothing like paying for insurance which doesn’t benefit you.  Whether you think it is fair or not you agreed to it.

New wrinkle for the banks

But that aside there seems to be a problem.  What many homeowners have discovered is that the loan sold to you was junk.  Full of ridiculous fees and your final application and Good Faith Estimate (“GFE”) did not match your initial documents.  The loan officer rounded up income and rounded down debt where necessary to maximize their commissions at the onset and origination of the loan.

The mortgage insurance association is not too happy about insuring predatory or fraudulent loans.  It seems they prefer to be in the premium collecting business not the paying out claims business.  They know that the odds of collecting thousands of dollars from a recently foreclosed or short sale homeowner is scarce.  So now they are pursuing the banks that ginned up the lousy loans and asking them to make good on their promise to buy them back (if they where fraudulent).

Jeff Barnes a foreclosure defense attorney posted a good article which is below…

- The Bank Slayer

In a letter dated September 2, 2010 from Teresa M. Casey, Executive Director of the Association of Financial Guaranty Insurers (hereafter AFGI) to Brian T. Moynihan, Chief Executive Officer and President of Bank of America Corporation (hereafter BOA), Ms. Casey notifies Mr. Moynihan of the obligations of BOA (including Countrywide Home Loans) which are owed to the financial guaranty insurance industry “arising from representations and warranties provided by BOA on securitizations, insured by our industry members, of home equity lines of credit (”HELOCs”), and first and second lien residential mortgage loans.”

The letter states that while BOA has publicly announced its intention to challenge its representation and warranty obligations on a “loan by loan” basis, the AFGI “submits that this defensive posture will soon prove ineffective in shielding BOA from the financial, accounting, legal and other implications of its massive obligations to our industry members.”

How massive? The letter states that each of the industry members which has insured BOA securitizations has concluded, based on reports of third-party experts, that “well more than half” of the non-performing loans originated in 2005, 2006, and 2007 “qualify for repurchase by BOA”, and that the current estimate for repurchase liability is in the range of $10 to $20 billion for industry members alone.

The letter states that “all of the HELOC securitizations and tens of billions of dollars of other residential mortgage (including first lien) securitizations sponsored by BOA were insured by our industry members”. The letter goes on to advise that the industry members “are committed to pursuing their rights against BOA for representation and warranty repurchases in connection with our insured securitizations.”

What does this mean for residential foreclosures initiated by BOA? it means that there is and will continue to be unresolved issues as to at least the following:

(a)  whether a loan was misrepresented in any respect to the insurers, including the ability of the borrower to continue payments throughout the life of the loan. If so, this could provide evidence that the loan was predatory and result in a counterclaim or defense to a foreclosure by the borrower.

(b)  the extent of available insurance on the loan (arising out of the apparent coverage and repurchase issues implicated by the letter), which itself gives rise to issues as to available setoffs against amounts claimed due and owing.

(c)  the extent of payments made on defaulted loans in securitizations by whatever insurance may have been available prior to coverage being contested.

(d)  if BOA persists in its “loan by loan” defensive challenge to coverage, a possible stay of any BOA-related foreclosure until it is determined whether securitization insurance on the particular loan the subject of the foreclosure is being challenged by BOA and pending the final disposition of any such challenge.

We have been hammering on these issues as to available insurances and setoffs in securitized loans for years. We have repeatedly sought this information in discovery only to receive objections. We have also had several opposing attorneys claim that no such insurance on securitized mortgage loans even existed. This letter proves that such insurance exists and has existed as to loans originated as far back as 2005, so opposing counsel either (a) lied, or (b) was not informed as to their own client’s operations.

Fortunately, we have had many courts in our cases deem this discovery relevant, and we have had many foreclosures dismissed for the foreclosing party’s failure to provide this very discovery with any refiling conditioned on the subject court-ordered discovery being provided in total. What we see happening in light of this letter are the assertion of additional defenses, additional discovery, and possibly additional claims being made by borrowers in securitization cases. Further, if the insurance industry is making such a claim against BOA, it is probably not long before similar claims will be made against Wells Fargo, US Bank, Deutsche Bank, and the others pursuing foreclosures.

Wells Fargo admitted it made mistakes in roughly 55,000 foreclosure cases.  Surprise, surprise, surprise!

Wells announced Wednesday that it will quickly “fix” these issues and re-file the necessary documents by the middle of November.

Wells called the mistakes “technical“, and it says “it has no plans to halt the foreclosure process”.

Of course, they won’t stop the foreclosure process.  I mean why stop when you can plow ahead – right or wrong.

What exactly is a technical mistake?  Is that like the time I forgot to put a stamp of my payment and it came back?    Will you credit my payment as on time because of my technical mistake?   I doubt it.   But your “technical” mistake is not just a snafu.  It is a LIE!!!  Affidavits that state items like, “I have personal knowledge of this account and the balance owed.  I have personal knowledge that the owner of the debt is XYZ.”    Really?

Depositions of two Wells Fargo employees have called the company’s foreclosure practices into question. One employee said that she signed between 300-500 foreclosure documents a day, while another employee admitted to only verifying dates on the documents he signed daily.

The entire foreclosure application and judicial process is supposed to be built around substantiated facts.  Rolling into court, holding up a sworn affidavit which no one has read it, and declaring who owns the debt and the amount owed is just wrong.

We're coming for you!

It really gets me fired up when they say, “We don’t believe that there are instances in which the foreclosures would not have occurred otherwise,” Teri Schrettenbrunner, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman, said.

If this is so then why do we have people in our office facing foreclosure when they have MADE THEIR PAYMENTS!   Innocent as well as “guilty” people are being swept up in the rush to foreclose.  The facts need to be verified!

Why don’t we just lock people up because they appear so guilty that it is obvious that they deserve jail time.  What happened to due process?

- The Bank Slayer

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that BofA is ready to crank up the foreclosure machine once again.

Amazing what can be done when Bank of America might take a financial hit.

BofA can’t seem to locate the submitted paperwork for a loan modification (or short sale) at least 30% of the the time.  Their vaunted Equator system can take weeks to deliver a written approval for a short sale once “approved”; but yet they now can process and replace over 100,000 affidavits and assignments of mortgages in just two weeks!!

Wow, they must have hired some new robo-signers we haven’t met yet.

Why?  Because it takes time to read through your own affidavit, much less an entire Application for Foreclosure.

The average “application for foreclosure” in Texas is 40+ pages.  They must have somehow found a ton of people with live, actual, personal knowledge of the proof of ownership and the exact amount owed on each of these 102,000 loans they are “fixing”.

Now here is the scary thing…follow me here:

At only 15 seconds a page, it would take at least 10 minutes to read each application.  Remember the person is swearing they know everything is accurate and PERFECT.

10 minutes x 102,000 loans = 1,020,000 minutes.  Assuming they have 100 people working on this, that now equates to 10,200 minutes per person or 170 hours.  At 40 hours a week that would take over a month if they worked non-stop.

So how can they be ready in two weeks?  Maybe they found 1,000 people with “knowledge” and thus it can be done more quickly.

When they finish this task maybe they can put these industrious workers on loan modification and short sale reviews.

- The Bank Slayer

Press hard, third copy is yours.  What did you just sign?

Tim Hammond, an experienced REALTOR in the Greater Houston area, posed a question to our team last week.  He heard mortgage servicers are mass mailing loan modifications (and/or mass mailing approvals for loan mods), especially to those folks facing foreclosure.  Is this true?

Since one of our services is assisting homeowners with loan modification, and yes some of our clients are facing foreclosure, we should be able to see if this recent rumor is real.   We’ll watch this during this week and post and update.

Now the interesting part…why.  Why would banks that are facing scrutiny about their foreclosure procedures suddenly offer up approvals of loan modifications?  The first thing that comes to mind is they don’t want to deal with the added hassle of a foreclosure and are willing to get the homeowner to at least start sending in some money.  Maybe, but based on our experience I doubt it.

The dirty secret, which others have pointed out, is this: They NEED you to sign a piece of paper in which you acknowledge that YOU OWE THEM.   That’s it.  Simple.

Here’s an example. Five years ago you signed a promissory note to Ameriquest on a refinance.  The loan and the servicing of the loan was sold and transferred one or more times.  In this example, let’s assume you are currently serviced by Chase.  Well the boys at J P Morgan Chase have a real problem on their hands.  It seems they can’t find your promissory note (or they destroyed it), can’t prove they currently own your mortgage (it was sold to Fannie Mae), or they are too busy to worry about following the law and establishing that they are merely the servicer for Fannie Mae, who in turn sold your loan into Wall Street and Fannie Mae is still making your payments to some bond holder on Wall Street (or AIG’s credit default insurance paid off your loan).    So now they have a problem – but they have an easy solution – LOAN MODIFICATION TIME.  If they entice you to sign a loan modification with some tricky language in which you ADMIT that you owe the debt to Chase Home Finance, LLC (just the servicer) and GIVE UP & WAIVE all possible claims against Chase, their predecessors, successors and their 5th cousin twice removed, now they don’t need to fabricate foreclosure affidavits or use robo signers.        GAME OVER, BANK WINS!

If you are offered a loan modification, there are three solutions to this issue.

1. Pay off your mortgage.  Give them whatever they want and keep every receipt forever.  The U.S. Treasury may come looking for their money and you’ll need to prove that you paid off a bank and Uncle Sam needs to file a claim with the bank for your mortgage payments/payoff.
2. Have an attorney, versed in these matters, review and explain to you the terms of your modification.  If you understand and are willing to accept the terms then sign and start paying.
3. Fight.  File suit if necessary to make them prove the ownership of the debt and the amount outstanding (if any).

- The Bank Slayer