Something happened last Wednesday that is eye-opening, on several levels.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Office of Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) slammed one of the nation's biggest banks: Bank of America (NYSE: BAC).
It turns out BofA, like several other financial giants, is a billion-dollar fraud machine.
Plop, plop, fizz, fizz (that's me dropping my Alka-Seltzer), oh, what a surprise it is…
Only this latest scheme could have taken money directly from your pocket… and someone needs to be locked up.
Why Aren't These BofA Fraudsters Going to Jail?
The CFPB looked back as far as 2001 into BofA's marketing and sales of "add-on" products.
And it wasn't a surprise to the CFPB (I'll get to why it wasn't in a minute) that Bank of America had ripped off their beloved credit card customers by selling them stuff like identity theft protection and credit protection programs, without ever actually providing much of anything.
I'm not going to talk about the OCC's part in this because the OCC has only lately been flexing its puny muscles and was in LaLa Land before, during, and after the financial crisis and is a useless regulator, really just playing tag-along on the shoulders of the CFPB. Oh wait, I just did talk about them.
Anyway, CFPB Director Richard Cordray, a really great – make that a bloody amazing – crusading white-knight regulator said in a call with reporters, "We will continue to be vigilant in pursuit of anyone who deceives or mistreats consumers."
Deborah Morris, the CFPB's deputy enforcement director, estimated about 1.5 million consumers paid at least $459 million just for identity protection products.
The joint-agency enforcement action also alleges the bank used deceptive marketing tactics when selling a payment protection product meant to cancel the customer's debt if they experienced an involuntary hardship.
Check out the gory rip-'em-off details from Cordray himself – seriously, you can't make this stuff up:
Join the conversation. Click here to jump to comments…
About the Author
Shah Gilani is the Event Trading Specialist for Money Map Press. In Zenith Trading Circle Shah reveals the worst companies in the markets - right from his coveted Bankruptcy Almanac - and how readers can trade them over and over again for huge gains.Shah is also the proud founding editor of The Money Zone, where after eight years of development and 11 years of backtesting he has found the edge over stocks, giving his members the opportunity to rake in potential double, triple, or even quadruple-digit profits weekly with just a few quick steps. He also writes our most talked-about publication, Wall Street Insights & Indictments, where he reveals how Wall Street's high-stakes game is really played.
TIME FOR A ROUTINE Bank CHECK-UP
The teller at a local Federal Credit Union where management is actually responsible about their job and did not make any sub-prime loans to anyone ( nor suffer the resulting losses either). Consequently, this Credit Union's Net Worth Ratio is a relatively healthy 11.76%.
What is the Net Worth Ratio or liquidity of a To big to fail ( TBIF) Bank like Bank of America or Wells Fargo?? Its certainly much less than most banks in Hong Kong or Singapore, that's for sure. So, you should be talking about financial health, not FDIC "stress tests" or some other measurement.