Foreclosure victims across California will get $1,500 checks

Published: Tuesday, June 4, 2013 at 12:44 p.m.

Last Modified: Tuesday, June 4, 2013 at 1:55 p.m.

SACRAMENTO ? More than 200,000 Californians will each receive checks worth nearly $1,500 this month as part of the national mortgage settlement, the state attorney general's office said Tuesday.

The money is going to homeowners who successfully filed claims saying they were the victims of wrongful foreclosures.

Attorney general spokesman Nick Pacilio said that the national settlement administrator, Rust Consulting, will mail checks of about $1,480 starting next week to about 207,000 Californians who lost their homes.

That amounts to more than $307 million in settlement money statewide, and is part of the $1.5 billion in settlement checks that will be sent to nearly 1 million borrowers nationwide.

Those who were eligible for the checks had their mortgage serviced by one of the settlement's five major banks and lost their homes to foreclosure between January 1, 2008 and December 31, 2011. The five participating banks are Ally Financial Inc., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Wells Fargo & Co.

The borrowers filed claims that they were the victims of misconduct by the lenders in the servicing of their mortgages. That primarily involved complaints that lenders lost their refinancing applications or that the borrowers were victims of what are known as "dual-track foreclosures," a practice that is now illegal in California where lenders filed notices of default while they also considered alternatives to foreclosures.

The money is part of the $42 billion national settlement, which is projected to bring more than $20 billion in relief or compensation to California. The bulk of the money will be in the form of loan modifications and refinancing of mortgages, Pacilio said.

Source: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20130604/wire/130609846

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