[Updated May 2019] We are avid readers of Rolling Stone magazine. Although I read 20 to 30 magazines per month, one of my first stops each month at Barnes & Noble is the music and entertainment magazine section to see if the new Rolling Stone is out. Several months ago we were delighted to find an article by Matt Taibbi on our perennial “favorite” corporate degenerate, Bank of America.
That article has gone viral and for good reason. Taibbi pulls no punches on the nations’s worst corporate citizen. While we have known several wonderful people who have worked for BoA, the institution itself has lost its direction. It has become too big and lost its direction. No one is at the helm anymore.
Last year I shared dinner with an outgoing VP from BoA along with former New York City Mayor and presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. The dinner company was obviously fascinating but what really piqued my curiosity was learning about the corporate culture at Bank of America and the lack of a moral compass. It’s like a ship with thousands of sailors but no captain.
We have seen many businesses hurt by Bank of America. Perhaps more importantly, we have seen many homeowners that have had their lives shattered by America’s big bank.
We can’t reprint the Rolling Stone article but urge readers to find it on line. It is one of the best we have read. Here is an excerpt, “At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers? Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they’ll be into some shit again: This bank is like the world’s worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt’s funeral. They’re out of control, yet they’ll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily commuted to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.”
As bank fraud lawyers, we fight big banks on a daily basis — Bank of America and the quadriplegic who is losing his home after the bank wrongfully doubled his mortgage payments because they thought his insurance lapsed. The woman about to retire only to find herself in foreclosure after BoA promised her a loan modification. The 94 year old woman forced to sign paperwork pledging a CD to help her daughter only to find she had signed a personal guaranty. (That bank settled for almost $1 million, although we can’t name the bank.)
The banking industry has run amok. There are still great banks out there. And great bankers committed to helping people and businesses. Unfortunately, there is a new vampire class of banks whose sole mission seems to seek to suck the life out of people barely holding on.
This is a rather extreme post for us but we see and hear these stories every day. As a society, we often close our eyes and ears and hope these thing are just isolated incidents or exaggerated. Unfortunately they are not.
We are interested in talking to victims of wrongful foreclosures, bait and switch tactics, predatory lending and foreclosures and outright fraud. We can’t take every case but have taken cases across the United States. While it isn’t easy litigating against big banks, the American jury system remains the great equalizer. It is still possible to win.
The bank fraud lawyers at Mahany law sue banks for wrongful foreclosures, fraud and other breaches of fiduciary duty. We are not a traditional foreclosure defense firm. Instead, we try to turn the tables on banks and sue them for their own wrongful conduct. Cases with losses or potential losses in excess of $250,000 considered.
If you feel that you were the victim of a fraud by a mortgage company, bank or financial professional, give us a call. Many cases can be handled on a contingency or “success” fee basis meaning no legal fees unless we recover money for you. For more information, contact attorney Brian Mahany at or by telephone at (414) 704-6731 (direct).
Mahany law – America’s Fraud Lawyers. Offices in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Detroit, Michigan; Portland, Maine; Minneapolis, Minnesota and San Francisco, California.
Postscript May 2019
When this post was written, we had not even filed our first whistleblower case against Bank of America. Shortly thereafter we filed such a case. Just two days before Christmas 2014, that case was responsible for $171 million dollars in whistleblower rewards. Bank of America paid $16.65 billion.
Bank of America would also be named in many other schemes and scams. For example, in 2015 they and 10 other well known banks – those that we call the usual suspects – would pay a combined $1.87 billion for anti-competitive behavior involving the derivatives market. They were also accused of rigging interest rates as part of the larger LIBOR scandal.
Do we think the fraud has stopped? No way! For many big banks, getting caught is just a cost of doing business. As long as no executives goes to jail, the fraud isn’t likely to end.
That case and several others have changed our practice. We now limit our practice on cases against banks to those with an out-of-pocket loss of $5 million. Regrettably, we have simply become so busy that we no longer handle individual residential foreclosures. The only exceptions are pro bono cases that we are assigned from the local Legal Services Corporation affiliate.
We also focus more on bank whistleblower cases. Our clients have received over $100 million in rewards in recent years!
To learn more about our lawsuits against banks, visit our lender liability website. Interested in becoming a bank whistleblower and earning a reward? Visit our bank fraud and FIRREA whistleblower pages. You can also contact is through the links above. All inquiries are protected by the attorney – client privilege and kept confidential. We accept lender liability cases nationwide and whistleblower cases worldwide.