These goons sent me a stack of notices over two or three years that measures almost 5 inches high. The strikingly hilarious thing is no notice included the name of the lender on whose behalf they were trying to intimidate me. There was never any basis for legal action against me, and though it took a court order, my loan was eventually modified as it should have been seven years earlier.
Baffle, Barf, Latte and Frappucino are one of the many so-called "law" firms who signed on to lick the boots of Lender Processing Services, a foreclosure-expediting company so egregious and sloppy that its executives had to cut a deal, in 2011, with the Attorneys General (AGs) of all 50 states. The result was a consent order that required them to stop commanding a fleet of lap dog loser law firms and stop colluding with them in document fabrication, signature forgery, and illegal foreclosure. LPS also had to pay a large sum of money to the AGs' offices, which neither hurt LPS nor helped you.
Of special relevance in this review is that LPS sought to prevent communication between the lap dog law firms and their clients, who were our loan servicers and/or lenders. When this law firm was hammering you with an entire Douglas fir's worth of paper every month, your loan servicer might have had very little input or awareness, and might have been more willing to negotiate a reasonable re-finance than it seemed. The set-up was masterful. Loan servicers signed with LPS because LPS offered their foreclosing services free of charge. So how did LPS make money if it gave away its core service? Easy. Once they'd captured the potential clients for foreclosure law firms, they offered them to law firms, saving the law firms the trouble of recruiting their own clients/ The law firms paid kickbacks to LPS for throwing business their way, which is ... illegal! LPS required law firms to follow a factory-like method and clocked them at every stage. The fastest were rewarded and commended, and the slowest were kicked to the curb. With LPS offering loan servicers free foreclosure services that included (mandatory) matching with attorneys in the LPS network, there weren't many clients available to law firms that couldn't or wouldn't perform in LPS's assembly-line speed-foreclosure system.
Here's the order in all its legalistic splendor:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/files/enf20110413a11.pdf
Attorney Neil Garfield recommends that people adversely affected by law firms that were part of the LPS machine submit a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to your state attorney general's office to find out what they've done to enforce the 2011 consent order. It required LPS to clean up their act and undo some of the harm they did. Did LPS comply with the order in the manner required in your state? If not, did your AG do anything about it?
Submitting a request is simple. (Basic instructions appear below.) Of course, it's hard to know what to ask for. Garfield recommends including in your FOIA request the following:
Has your office been receiving quarterly compliance reports as required in the 2011 Lender Processing Services consent judgement?
Please send me copies of all quarterly reports and correspondence.
How many people in the state were affected by LPS's illegal practices, which included forgeries and fabrications of loan documents?
What percent of the funds the state received from the consent judgement were used to help the state's residents? How was the rest used?
What duties to comply were included in the consent order for individual loan servicing companies? If [your loan servicer] was among those with duties to comply, what were its duties?
You can contact your state AG's office by phone, mail or email to find out where and how to submit a FOIA request. Probably, though, your state AG has an online form. Californians can submit here:
https://oag.ca.gov/contact/publicrecords_form
If you want to write a letter, you can use this template:
http://www.nfoic.org/california-sample-foia-request
Residents of other states can find similar resources here:
http://www.nfoic.org/state-foi-resources
More on the topic here, on Garfield's blog:
https://livinglies.wordpress.com/2017/08/25/weekend-homework-contact-your-attorney-general-about-the-lps-consent-judgement-now/ read more