Household - HSBC Watch is responding to a request as we try to find out what happened to people involved with Household International's $484 million predatory lending settlement. Much to our amazement, we discovered a posting in the forums which stood out.
The post came from Household International, behind the corporate firewall, in the middle of the business day. Somewhat snotty and sarcastic, this is what we found: "Why was your house taken? Didn't you make the payments? How can they take a home if you make your payments?"
Here is the information from the post, verified three ways. It was verified using BBclone, our site counter, and the forum IP address tracking:
Record Type: IP Address IP Location: United States - Illinois - Chicago - Household International Reverse IP: No websites hosted using this IP address IP: 63.111.163.13 Time 2:56;54 pm Operating System Microsoft WinXP Browser Internet Explorer 6.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Connect 1.0) Time of Visit Jan 27 2005 2:56:54 pm Last Page View Jan 27 2005 3:11:17 pm Visit Length 14 minutes and 23 seconds Page Views 25
Household International is now HSBC Finance Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sir John Bond's London based HSBC Plc.
Beneficial Finance and Household Finance structured loans that were predatory in nature, quoting payments to prospective customers, where those payments barely covered the monthly interest. In addition, the majority of loans had a clause similar to a balloon, and the clause called the note due in full after a certain period. The clause barely qualified the loans as fixed term loans. After contracts were signed the borrower(s) were told that they needed to pay more each month to make the balance go down.
Acounts were structured in a manner which guaranteed maximum payments to Household International, while putting borrowers in a position to fail. But there is history and a track record with Household. In 1998 California sued Household after Household admitted to overcharging more than 36,000 borrowers. But in 2001, when California did a follow up, the found that Household did not conform, and in fact their lending practices got worse and Household passed the practices on the their sister company Beneficial Finance. California sued Household again. All of this is in our document "The History of Predatory Lending."
Household - HSBC Watch is a consumer watchdog organization. Our volunteers thought you should know what Household - HSBC did and said today. Air Mail to London is only 80 cents. HSBC Corporate will get a letter from us, once again demonstrating how William Aldinger's staff is out of control.
But why would an HSBC employee do and say such a thing? Why make a comment like that to someone who lost their home to foreclosure? And why do it from behind the company firewall? We report - you decide.
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