Mortgage customers vent, lenders fume on fed hotline
WASHINGTON — Mortgage borrowers by the hundreds are lining up to vent their anger and tell their tales of woe on a federally run consumer complaint website — and the banks and mortgage companies who are the targets of their criticisms are steamed about it.
Welcome to the roiling controversy over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s consumer complaint hotline. Since 2012, the bureau has encouraged consumers to send in complaints when they encounter problems dealing with lenders, credit bureaus, credit card companies, debt collectors and other financial players.
The bureau logs each complaint by category in a publicly viewable database and gives the company that is the subject of a complaint time to respond via a nonpublic online portal connecting it with the consumer through a bureau intermediary. In the past three years, according to the bureau, it has received and worked on more than 627,000 complaints. They range from alleged harassment by debt-collection attorneys, to foreclosures, student loan defaults and poor treatment of customers by loan servicers. Roughly 28 percent of all complaints filed to date have been about mortgage issues — the largest single category. What’s been missing, though, has been any real detail about the troubling circumstances that triggered the complaint in the first place expressed in the customer’s own words.
Starting in late June, that all changed. The bureau began posting what it calls “narratives” that name the bank or company involved and go into sometimes excruciating detail. Allegations get pretty serious — charges of lending fraud, violations of federal regulations and illegal overcharges. Some are heartfelt, such as one from a Virginia homebuyer whose closing was repeatedly delayed by the bank: “Who compensates us for the loss of income for the days taken off from work (to attend closings)? For the movers that have been scheduled? For the pre-move-in renovations that cannot now be done because the contractors are fully scheduled for the rest of the summer?” (To see the narratives, go to http://tinyurl.com/phnkq99)