Anonymous To Release Documents Proving BOA Committed Fraud on Monday | Hacker News Reader

Anonymous To Release Documents Proving BOA Committed Fraud on Monday

dailykos.com

130 pointssteveeq133 comments

I likely will not be surprised by whatever they release. I will be genuinely surprised if anything comes of it. This news strikes me in the same way as a headline proclaiming "US Congress is beholden to special interests" or such.

I guess it's good in that we will have something concrete to which one can refer when trying to convince the friends and family to join a credit union.

I guess it's good in that we will have something concrete to which one can refer when trying to convince the friends and family to join a credit union.

This is the big lesson of this release: don't buy shady companies, even when they are cheap, because they will ruin your reputation.

Bank of America Home Loans was probably largely above-board with respect to its lending during the mortgage crisis, but then they decided to buy Contrywide, which was ... not so good. Now they get to take all of Countrywide's losses, both financially and in terms of public relationships. Countrywide didn't misbehave, Bank of America Corporation did, because Countrywide is defunct. And then people close their BofA accounts to make a statement, even though there was no relationship between BofA and Countrywide when Countrywide was being bad.

That said, this is all just speculation. Maybe this is actually about BofA. But I kind of doubt it.

Anecdotal experience here, but my father who had a Countrywide home loan before BoA took over has lamented that change since the first day. The big issues for him have been customer service, at Countrywide, the people he talked to were personable and handled things in a timely manner. While dealing with BoA, the people he talked with couldn't wait to get him off the phone, accused him of fault when there was an issue with the bill caused by BoA, and took forever to deal with said issues. He has been trying to get his loan refinanced for 4 months now, but they have a queue, and they only process 8 refinances a month. Makes a lot of sense...

Now this doesn't prove anything towards what Anon is going to release, but it just shows, to me at least, that BoA very likely is not so innocent in all this.

"he worked for BoA And CW most of his adult life and know's everything and anything BoA just sent me some BoA emails.. LOL.. Stay tune."[1]

From the tweets it sounds like the leaker was with Countrywide when it was being bad (assuming) and is angry at being later fired by BofA. Explosive combination even if BofA is clean, as someone whose dream is "being on tv exposing BoA"[2] probably doesn't care to make the distinction.

[1]:http://twitter.com/OperationLeakS/status/46016032409780224 [2]:http://twitter.com/OperationLeakS/status/46069409877458944

Thank you Anon, you may be freedoms last hope. Wish I was joking.

No kidding, when the last hope for freedom is a bunch of bored teenage kids hanging out on a anime related board, we are so fucked.

"Every joke is a tiny revolution." --George Orwell

While Anonymous rose from the primordial goo that is 4chan, I'm fairly convinced a majority of the people who have identified with the hacktivism of Anonymous since have little to do with the imageboard.

Disclaimer: I have never associated myself with Anon, but am curiously interested in them from an emergent behavior standpoint.

weren't we always?

"I seen some of the emails… I can tell you Grade A Fraud in its purest form…" read one tweet. "He Just told me he have GMAC emails showing BoA order to mix loan numbers to not match it's Documents.. to foreclose on Americans.. Shame."

This is about as persuasive as a 419 letter. Someone who is only semi-literate is unlikely to have a firm grasp of legal issues.

I suspect lawyers in all non-english-speaking countries may disagree with you. Equating poor english grammar with low intelligence is making rather a lot of conclusions from little data.

That's a straw man. The parent comment was equating a poor grasp of English with a poor understanding of American law, not with low intelligence.

Did I say anything about intelligence? No.

Is someone with poor English grammar skills likely to have an accurate understanding of either US legal codes or the legal implications of BoA's internal memos...both of which are written in English?

I can read and write French, but it's been so long since I did so on a regular basis that I'd probably have difficulty writing a postcard in that language. Would you trust me to perform legal analysis on a pile of French documents? Because if you would, I'd like to be paid up front, in cash.

"Tap Water Slowly Kills Brains And Drinking Tap Everyday You Can't Be Shocked When You Get Cancer Out Of No Were...." -- http://twitter.com/OperationLeakS/status/40235981365977090

"Tap Water Is Given To The Public By The Gov And They Really Hate People Living Long Healthy Lives... So They Cut Them Short.." -- http://twitter.com/OperationLeakS/status/40237539138740225

"Remember The More Your Sick The More The Insurance Company Makes Money.. Everything Is Connected.." -- http://twitter.com/OperationLeakS/status/40237925744656384

I still don't understand why if this is srsly damning evidence that WikiLeaks, who hypothetically had it first, didn't lead with that before pissing off every government that can read English. If they'd led with bank fraud they'd be held as heroes by the government/ press, all the more hilarious when they later bite those same hands. Running things in this order means the last leak wasn't nearly as effective and this one is likely to be tarred by the reputation of those who brought it to light.

There has to be some bit of the story we don't have here to make a bunch of very smart people act this way.

My guess: because it's somewhat tangential to their sekrit plan. Namely, pissing off the governments and forcing them to pick one of "secure and hobbled", "leaky and embarrassed", or "nothing to hide".

My guess is that these documents are not the same documents that WikiLeaks holds.

Original source: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/hacker-collective-anonymous...

Original original (Gawker) source: http://gawker.com/#!5781158/what-does-anonymous-have-on-bank...

While Monday's better than, say, "250k slowly over the course of a year" (looks like it's only at 5500, could be more than a year...), can someone explain to me why one should wait? Maybe letting the Japan news die down a little bit or something?

Basic marketing - the idea is to get something, anything, noticed by the major media, and the only way that will happen is for it to be trending on Twitter or something.

The same principle as having an announcement splash page to gather a mailing list, so when you launch you can tell everybody on it and try to get a critical mass going.

Attention inertia.

Why not just release the documents and let them speak for themselves? The fact that he feels the need to hype their release makes me suspicious that the extent of fraud might not be that great, thus the need to hype it ahead of time to make it seem like a bigger deal than it is.

One thing to consider: If these emails did contain evidence of fraud, the evidence would not be permitted in a court of law because the evidence was obtained (I assume) without warrant and illegally.

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure it's not admissible when the government obtains it without warrant and illegally. When evidence is revealed by someone else acting illegally, it's fair game for the government to use it.

Angelo Mozillo is free, though, so I'm not getting my hopes up.

They've been released: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2321373

Oh no oh no oh no Anon pissed off Assange!! Whatever will he do..

as financial people continue to invent securities and investment instruments that have no basis directly relating to the demand and supply curve of physical items and than use that to directly bet against their very own customers putting firms and countries at huge risk will see an increase on whistle blower reports on all layers of the financial con games..

While some of Anon methods are certainly illegal. Which is the greater good Anon in jail or the fraudsters with the title financier..

There are unfortunately for this Financier Business Women and Man class far more people that got harmed than helped which should not weigh in on this debate but does explain the motivations ...

We are taking workers future earnings to 'bail out these bastards' so maybe the slightly illegal stuff has no point for debate here until we start seeing financiers in jail..

If you think that is harsh..

In the US laws on books that banks cannot be directly involved in liar loans.. ...all loans have to have verifiable collateral either assets or combo of income and credit ratings...its covered by Uniform Commercial Code, FDIC, Federal Reserve requirements, etc..

This is not the only area..remember when banks recently refused to revalue and write off loans? They had US Congress, etc pass new accounting laws that make it no longer illegal to continue with those very bad valuations..

Mod parent up. There's plenty of evidence of unethical behavior (including fraud), particularly in mortgage origination, servicing, and securitization, but the various regulatory agencies will not prosecute.

I'm troubled by your implication that the end justifies the means. That path leads to evil.

I also think you're not understanding finance very well. There's no rational reason to insist that financial instruments must be "directly relating to the demand and supply curve of physical items". There are plenty of good reasons for such instruments, facilitating risk management [1] and liquidity in the markets.

[1] Of course, in this case, the particular instruments did the opposite of risk management. This is because their risk models were flawed. I agree with you regarding the moral hazard created by gov't meddling, making it so that financial institutions don't need to learn lessons about ensuring their risk models are based in better-understood methods, or are at least very conservative.

In case it wasn't obvious before: "Anonymous" is Wikileaks.

It is to be expected that a pseudo-organization concocted (or shall I say "arisen") to combat a government which is itself magnificently designed to quickly and thoroughly shut down any organization formed in its opposition, that such a resisting force might have a hard-to-understand structure, purely out of necessity.

Basically, there's a virtual firehose of disgruntled people, and then there are a few (a "few" in this context meaning a few hundred) smart people who facilitate their efforts to do damage to the system they collectively revile. For example, I doubt that the creators of LOIC have ever used it themselves. Assange used to break into systems himself, but these days he just makes it easier for other people who break into systems to report what they find.

In the case of Wikileaks, these facilitators are at least themselves organized, lead by Julian Assange. In the case of Anonymous, they are less organized, spread across lots of random IRC channels, wikis, and imageboards, so that even the people running the show don't know who is running the show.

Such a system would, of course, collapse immediately, if there weren't a constant, massive influx of disgruntled people with Internet connections and plenty of free time to read through bugtraq archives and free online hacking guides, and the recklessness necessary to not care if you get caught (notice how various arrests haven't stopped anyone). Those who don't get caught, they eventually start teaching other people, providing kids who wander into lcirc asking "how does I hacked BoA" with the information necessary to make it happen. Recall that the hack that took down HBGary wasn't technically astounding; it was a combination of HBGary's total incompetence and Anon's willingness to try shit until it worked.

So, could this be Wikileaks operating under the banner of Anonymous, and is Wikileaks itself a part of Anonymous? It's hard to say, because Anonymous is itself more of a phenomenon than a group, a criticality accident of discontent, if you will. They both operate on the same principles, though.

(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticality_accident )

I don't agree with everything in your assessment, but I applaud you for thinking/knowing beyond "4chan did it".

Wikileaks is not Anonymous. Wikileaks proclaimed that these documents would be released in January. It appears that they either handed them off to Anonymous or Anonymous got impatient with Wikileaks' heel dragging and decided to release them itself.

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