12:47 PM
More Hacker Headaches for Bank of America
Nearly three months after shaking off WikiLeaks, Bank of America once again finds itself in the crosshairs of a web provocateur who's threatening to prove the firm is guilty of fraud. Hacker Anonymous@OperationLeaks released a series of emails on Monday accusing the bank of improperly foreclosing on homes.
The emails were sent by a former employee of Balboa Insurance, which Bank of America acquired in 2008 after buying Countrywide Financial. According to reports, the emails show that Balboa hid information on those foreclosures. Bank of America denied the allegations, telling Reuters "we are confident that his extravagant assertions are untrue."
From DealBook:
The e-mails dating from November 2010 concern correspondence among Balboa employees in which they discuss taking steps to alter the record about certain documents "that went out in error." The documents were related to loans by GMAC, a Bank of America client, according to the e-mails."The following GMAC DTN's need to have the images removed from Tracksource/Rembrandt," an operations team manager at Balboa wrote. DTN refers to document tracking number, and Tracksource/Rembrandt is an insurance tracking system.
The response he receives: "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." According to the e-mails, approval was given to remove the loan numbers from the documents.
A member of Anonymous told DealBook on Monday that the purpose of his Web site was to bring attention to the wrongdoing of banks. "The way the system is, it's made to cheat the average person," he said."
Nevertheless, investors aren't overreacting. The stock was trading down around 1.7 percent Monday afternoon, in line with much of the banking sector, a far cry from the more than 3 percent plunge the stock took during it's earlier brush with WikiLeaks.
As the Senior Editor of Advanced Trading, Justin Grant plays a key role in steering the magazine's coverage of the latest issues affecting the buy-side trading community. Since joining Advanced Trading in 2010, Grant's news analysis has touched on everything from the latest ... View Full Bio