FTC Wins Huge $7.5 Million Penalty Against "Do Not Call" List Violator 136
coondoggie writes "The Federal Trade Commission today said it has won a $7.5 million civil penalty – the largest ever — against Mortgage Investors Corporation, one of the nation's biggest refinancers of veterans' home loans for allegedly violating 'Do Not Call' requirements. According to the FTC’s complaint, Mortgage Investors Corporation called consumers on the Federal Trade Commission’s National Do Not Call Registry, failed to remove consumers from its company call list upon demand, and misstated the terms of available loan products during telemarketing calls."
Re:I guess it was worth it then... (Score:5, Informative)
That works, but I agree that violating DNC should carry very heavy pernalties. If I put my number out there specificlaly to say "don't call me", then I damn well don't want to be called.
for allegedly violating (Score:3, Informative)
Pro-tip: You can stop saying "for allegedly violating" and start saying "for violating" when the guilty verdict is handed down.
Re:Very nice (Score:4, Informative)
But they already got the Cardholder Services people [slashdot.org]. That's how ineffective the penalties really are.
Re:I guess it was worth it then... (Score:3, Informative)
I worked for Mortgage Investors in Atlanta Georgia. The whole selling thing is a scam. You go to people's houses that had listened to the telemarketer's spiel. The telemarketer tells them great things. The sales person/loan officer(me) goes to the home with a presentation booklet and is supposed to read word for word from the presentation booklet as you flip through the pages. Very few read word for word because it is a whole lot of BS to swallow and the sales person knows it.
Then depending on the state, the Atlanta office handled both Georgia and Alabama, you did a 3 page worksheet showing how much money a month they would save by having this new loan. I'm a math major and the work sheet is math over load for me. The majority of the people I pitched the worksheet to just looked at me with their eyeballs just spinning when I was done. There was a reason for that.
That was all done to hide the fact that they were probably saving less than $100 a month but paying someone 8% of their loan value to do that. I tried to sabotage a loan for a customer that they were only saving $3 a month over 30 years but almost costing them $14,000 to do it. But the sales pitch does work and it gets them to concentrate on the $3 savings a month.
Many times through the worksheet presentation you mention the $3 monthly savings. It is also shown at the bottom of every worksheet page. I think for this guy I did the math on the cost of the loan which isn't in the worksheet and mentioned it a time or two before he signed the worksheet. I do believe the loan went through even though me trying to make it fail.
Now there is upsides to the company about 5% of customers do actually save a bunch of money. I did save a customer $600 a month on a loan that lived in rural South Georgia. I brought his loan from 10.5% to 6.25%. He could have probably had 4% if he had gone with a company that wasn't so fixated on getting the maximum allowed by law out of the customer.
On the odd case where the customer is saving too much money, the sales person/loan officer has the discretion to pitch a 15 year loan instead and even make more money off the loan.
Sales person/loan officer gets paid on average 0.5% of the loan value. Each sales person/loan officer got 3 homes to pitch to every day. 1 Million in loan values closed every 2 weeks got you a $5,000 paycheck at the end of those 2 weeks. I left after a year and a half of working there just as the housing bubble was bursting. There were several pay periods where I did do the 1 Million. Most pay periods averaged $200,000 to $300,000 though. Greed has a way of keeping your mouth shut.