Foreclosure victims will get $1,500 checks
The money will go to
about 207,000
Californian homeowners who claimed they were subject to wrongful foreclosures
Californian homeowners who claimed they were subject to wrongful foreclosures
ASSOCIATED
PRESS
SACRAMENTO — More than 200,000
Californians will each receive checks worth nearly $1,500 this month as part of
the national mortgage settlement, the state attorney general’s office said
Tuesday.
The money
is going to homeowners who successfully filed claims saying they were the
victims of wrongful foreclosures.
Attorney
general spokesman Nick Pacilio said that the national settlement administrator,
Rust Consulting, will mail checks of about $1,480 starting next week to about
207,000 Californians who lost their homes.
That
amounts to more than $307 million in settlement money statewide, and is part of
the $1.5 billion in settlement checks that will be sent to nearly 1 million
borrowers nationwide.
Those who
were eligible for the checks had their mortgage serviced by one of the
settlement’s five major banks and lost their homes to foreclosure between
January 1, 2008 and December 31, 2011. The five participating banks are Ally
Financial Inc., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co.,
and Wells Fargo & Co.
The
borrowers filed claims that they were the victims of misconduct by the lenders
in the servicing of their mortgages. That pri- marily involved
complaints that lenders lost their refinancing applications or that the
borrowers were victims of what are known as “dualtrack foreclosures,” a
practice that is now illegal in California where lenders filed notices of
default while they also considered alternatives to foreclosures.
The money is part of the $42 billion national settlement,
which is projected to bring more than $20 billion in relief or compensation to
California. The bulk of the money will be in the form of loan modifications and
refinancing of mortgages, Pacilio said.
