
Anonymous To Release Documents Proving BOA Committed Fraud on Monday - steveeq1
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/12/955682/-Anonymous-To-Release-Document-Proving-BOA-Committed-Fraud-on-Monday
======
mdaniel
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.

~~~
jrockway
_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.

~~~
chapel
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.

------
evo_9
Thank you Anon, you may be freedoms last hope. Wish I was joking.

~~~
tomjen3
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.

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

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anigbrowl
_"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.

~~~
glenjamin
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

------
bluehat
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.

~~~
JulianMorrison
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".

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steveplace
Original source: [http://www.zerohedge.com/article/hacker-collective-
anonymous...](http://www.zerohedge.com/article/hacker-collective-anonymous-
release-documents-proving-bank-america-committed-fraud-monday)

~~~
mbreese
Original original (Gawker) source: [http://gawker.com/#!5781158/what-does-
anonymous-have-on-bank...](http://gawker.com/#!5781158/what-does-anonymous-
have-on-bank-of-america)

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Jach
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?

~~~
Vivtek
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.

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rfugger
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.

------
derrida
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.

~~~
pessimizer
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.

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

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

------
shareme
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..

~~~
CWuestefeld
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.

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

~~~
scythe
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> )

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

