An Arm of Bank of America Tried to Conceal Information on Foreclosures, Alleges Hackers

According to an organization of hackers named Anonymous, an arm of Bank of America, Balboa Insurance, tried to conceal information on foreclosures. This was released in a string of e-mails on Monday 14th March by a previous employee of the bank. He contends that they expose how a section of bank attempted to conceal information on foreclosures.

Balboa Insurance was taken over by Bank of America, when it purchased in 2008 Countrywide Financial. Balboa Insurance handles insurances covering mortgages. According to the online messages the information linking the loans to other relevant documents were removed.

Speaking to Reuter, a spokesperson of Bank of America said that documents being referred to had been pilfered by a previous employee of Balboa; these were not linked to foreclosure. The spokesperson said, "We are confident that his extravagant assertions are untrue".

The online mails starting from 2010 November deal with correspondences between the staff of Balboa in which talks are held about taking measures to change the records of certain documents "that went out in error". The papers were connected to GMAC loans; GMAC is one of the clients of Bank of America.

One of the team managers of operations of Balboa wrote, "The following GMAC DTN’s need to have the images removed from Track Source/Rembrandt". DTN means document-tracking-number and Tracksource/Rembrandt are technical names for tracking system of insurance.

In response to the above the answer read, "I have spoken to my developer and she stated that we cannot remove the DTNs from Rembrandt, but she can remove the loan numbers, so the documents will not show as matched to those loans".

Thus from the e-mails it can be gathered that the nod was given for removal of loan numbers from these documents.

Speaking to DealBook one member of the hacker’s organization Anonymous said that the intention of his website was to bring to the notice of the public and everybody the wrongdoings of the banks. He said, "The way the system is, it’s made to cheat the average person".

The intention of setting up the website was to reveal bank facts and figures that had been promised by Wikileaks. It is being thought that the documents, that has till now not been released, would put the limelight on Bank of America. The spokesperson of Anonymous informed that there were no direct links with Wikileaks operated by Julain Assange.