Chase Hit With SEC Whistleblower Complaint - Explosive charges

Poboy

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Mon Dec-20-10 11:23 AM
Original message

Chase Hit With SEC Whistleblower Complaint - Explosive charges

Chase Hit With SEC Whistleblower Complaint Over Credit Card Practices
By ABIGAIL FIELD
12/17/10 Company News, People, JP Morgan Chase

Linda Almonte, a former employee of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) who is suing the bank for wrongful termination, has just upped the ante: She has now also filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The core allegations add context to her lawsuit, and they charge Chase with grotesque and illegal practices involving its credit card debt processes, including robo-signing. Chase denies her claims.

-----

Almonte's allegations are detailed in the Nov. 30 letter sent to the SEC. In the letter, she says:

1. Chase Bank sold to third party debt buyers hundreds of millions of dollars worth of credit card accounts. . .when in fact Chase Bank executives knew that many of those accounts had incorrect and overstated balances.

3. Chase Bank executives routinely destroyed information and communications from consumers rather than incorporate that information into the consumer's credit card file, including bankruptcy notices, powers of attorney, notice of cancellation of auto-pay, proof of payments and letters from debt settlement companies.

4. Chase Bank executives mass-executed thousands of affidavits in support of Chase Banks collection efforts and those Chase Bank executives did not have personal knowledge of the facts set forth in the affidavits.

5. When senior Chase Bank executives were made aware of these systemic problems, senior Chase Bank executives -- rather than remedy the problems -- immediately fired the whistleblower and attempted to cover up these problems.When I reached Almonte's lawyer, George Pressly, for comment, he was shocked that I had the letter because it was supposed to be confidential. While Pressly was willing to confirm Almonte was a client, beyond that he had no comment. Pressly, who was clearly trying to figure out how to handle the letter's disclosure, said he was suddenly getting a "firestorm" of calls and seemed unprepared for the onslaught. While he has filed many SEC complaints before -- he operates the website http://www.secwhistleblowerprogram.org/, which is how Almonte found him -- her letter is the first one he's filed that went public.

----

Concerning robo-signing, Pressly wrote:

"On numerous occasions, Ms. Almonte witnessed these Affidavit Signers work through at times 3-feet tall stacks of Judgment Affidavits at once during weekly multi-hour long, non-related company meetings. The notaries were not present at these meetings. The Affidavit Signers simply relied on hourly workers to reconcile amounts owed and then treated the actual execution of the affidavits as busy work to be performed while the Affidavit Signers could focus on other matters."

====

See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/hWDnR0