Bank of America will pony up $108 million to settle charges that Countywide Financial, which it acquired in July 2008, collected excessive mortgage-servicing fees from financially struggling homeowners, the Federal Trade Commission announced today. In some cases, said FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz, Countrywide charged fees to customers it wrongly said were in default and imposed new rounds of fees on homeowners who had recently emerged from bankruptcy protection. The payment, one of the largest in the commission’s history, will go to more than 200,000 homeowners whose loans were serviced by Countrywide before the Bank of America merger. [NYT] 

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Brokers say that as rental prices decline, potential renters are more
likely to fall for scams. “We deal with customers all day long who
think the market is 60 percent off when it’s really 15 to 20 percent,
depending on the location,” said Gary Malin, president of Citi
Habitats. “Those are the types of people who are susceptible to scams.
Whereas when you’re in a very strong market and hearing that prices are
escalating and vacancies are hard to find, people are more leery.” One of the most common deceptions is a keys-for-cash gambit
where a scammer takes information and pictures from a legitimate rental
or sales listing and reposts it under another name with a low rent.
Prospective renters are then tricked into paying an application fee or
submitting cash to borrow the keys to the unit. Students and
out-of-towners are more apt to fall for plots like the keys-for-money
scheme, said Leonard Gordon, the director of the Federal Trade
Commission’s Northeast office. [more]

The economic crisis has spawned several companies that prey on
homeowners who are having trouble paying their mortgages. The companies
promise to save borrowers’ homes from foreclosure in exchange for an
upfront fee, which is often thousands of dollars. New York Attorney
General Andrew Cuomo said he plans to sue one company, Uniondale-based
Amerimod, and plans to investigate 14 other loan modification companies
that his office received around 50 complaints about. The Federal Trade
Commission has brought about 11 cases against similar companies in the
last year and sent warning letters to 71 more for marketing potentially
deceptive mortgage relief programs. [more]