Bank of America Documents Show Mortgage Fraud: Operation #BlackMonday
Alluded to by the Anonymous community for months, leaks of Bank of America documents have finally begun to come to light, as the so-called #BlackMonday Operation began, today.
Posted at the site BankofAmericaSuck.com are screenshots of e-mails between ex-Bank of America employee, Jason Vaughn, and his former co-workers, as well as an e-mail interview given to Anonymous member, OperationLeakS. And, although many readers were expecting a larger treasure trove of information, the title of the post ("Part 1") indicates more to come. (The Huffington Post yesterday quoted a Bank of America Corp spokesman: "We are confident that his extravagant assertions are untrue.")
Normally, when employees decide to leave or are fired, a company cuts them off as quickly and surgically as possible. But Vaughn started keeping track of potentially damning correspondence early on. "The only reason I have what I have is because I made a habit of cc'ing one of my personal email addresses whenever I was asked to do something that didn't seem right or asked a question that never got answered."
A string of e-mails (with names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses still attached) are included in the first post in this series. In the emails, Joanne Anderson of the Balboa Insurance Group (a Bank of America division, since sold to Australian QBE Insurance Group, that handled insuring home loans and appears to have had its fingers in an awful lot of rich pies) asks her co-workers to remove loan numbers from a series of documents erroneously sent out (to whom, it's unclear). That way, when a search on a particular loan number is performed, the erroneous document will not show as having been sent. Removing the loan numbers required managerial approval from Vaughn and others. Fellow manager, Peggy Johnson, assured by Anderson the letters would not appear within the company's system as associated with the loans in question, replies with a terse: "Approved."
It certainly looks shady, but exactly what's happening here is unclear to the layperson. Is it a simple bending of the truth? (Oops! We sent the wrong papers! Let's send the right ones, then bury this screw up so no one will be the wiser. No biggie.) Or something much more nefarious? (Oops! We just cost 100,000 people their homes.)
Vaughn's personal assertions throughout the rest of the e-mail interview make for lively reading, despite the hassle of having to click through each screenshot of the e-mails in order to read them. The post is written as an interview between a member of the diverse Anonymous community and a desperate man with nothing left to lose. Vaughn claims to have been branded a "terrorist" with law enforcement because he dared to speak up against what he saw as fraud within Bank of America's loan practices.
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