About time! New York Charges JPMorgan with Mortgage Fraud

By Michael Collins

The big banks and Wall Street have escaped unpunished for causing the financial crisis. Now, New York Attorney General Eric Sneiderman is charging JPMorgan with mortgage fraud. It is a bold move and strong start on the path to justice.

(New York Times, Oct 1)  “The federal mortgage task force that was formed in January by the Justice Department filed its first complaint against a big bank on Monday, citing a broad pattern of misconduct in the packaging and sale of mortgage securities during the housing boom. The civil suit against Bear Stearns & Company, now a unit of JPMorgan Chase, was brought in New York State court by Eric T. Schneiderman, the state attorney general.”

Schneiderman charged Bear Sterns and JPMorgan, which acquired Bear, with fraud under the state’s Martin Act.  Unique to New York, the act allows prosecutors the ability to vigorously pursue financial fraud with both civil and criminal charges. The investigative powers provided are broader than those found in any state or among regulators (e.g., the Securities and Exchange Commission).

EMC Mortgage, Bear’s lending unit, “made material misrepresentations about the quality of the loans in the securities ” and ignored evidence of broad defects among the loans that they pooled and sold to investors.” EMC identified bad loans then demanded and received payments from originating lenders (firms they’d purchased the loans from). According to the indictment, the deception and fraud came when EMC failed to share any of the recovered fund with investors.

“Defendants systematically failed to fully evaluate the loans, largely ignored the defects that their limited review did uncover, and kept investors in the dark about both the inadequacy of their review procedures and the defects in the underlying loans.” Eric T. Schneiderman, Attorney General, New York, October 1

The New York Times described this indictment is a shift away from specific cases of fraud to indictment for a general pattern of fraud on the part of big finance. Given the man behind the charges, this spells trouble for the big banks and Wall Street.

Click here for the rest of the story from OP ED News.

Paul Wagenseil , SecurityNewsDaily

Why your money may be at risk after bank cyberattacks

For the past two weeks, an unknown attacker or group of attackers has disrupted access to the websites of five major American banks: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank and PNC Bank.

Many customers have had trouble reaching the sites to check their account balances or move money around, thanks to what appears to be a series of coordinated attacks.

It’s not clear exactly who’s behind the disruptions, despite the claims of a previously unknown Islamist group, or even what sort of methods they’re using, but here’s what we do know.

What’s really happening?

Someone’s flooding the Web servers of the banks’ websites with tons of useless requests for information that can’t be fulfilled, overwhelming the servers. Experts call this a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

As a tactic, it’s crude but temporarily effective; it doesn’t crash the servers, get into databases or cause lasting damage, but it does make the sites hard to reach by clogging the pipes.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the British anti-virus company Sophos, once likened a DDoS attack to “15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time.

Check out the rest of the story here: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/why-your-money-may-be-risk-after-bank-cyberattacks-6200003

Posted By: Susoni [Send E-Mail]
Date: Friday, 28-Sep-2012 15:20:36
I just posted an article, by CGI’s Morgan, below. That article is showing one of several scenarios they will use to start the war with Iran. One of them was a Cyber attack on Wall Street or banking. How predictable.

Susoni
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The financial and banking industries are on high alert tonight as a massive cyberattack continues, with potentially millions of customers of Bank of America, PNC and Wells Fargo finding themselves blocked from banking online.

“There is an elevated level of threat,” said Doug Johnson, a vice president and senior adviser of the American Bankers Association. “The threat level is now high.”

“This is twice as large as any flood we have ever seen,” said Dick Clarke, an ABC News consultant and former cybersecurity czar.

Sources told ABC News that the so-called denial of service attacks had been caused by hackers from the Middle East who had secretly transmitted signals commandeering thousands of computers worldwide.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/hackers-block-us-banks-online-service-bank-america/story?id=17343055#.UGWYNkXyaCM

A group of purported hackers in the Middle East has claimed credit for problems at the websites of both banks, citing the online video mocking the founder of Islam. One security source called that statement “a cover” for the Iranian government’s operations.

FULL STORY HERE…

xpost Posted on September 5, 2012

The banker zombies are not content at having been bailed out at the expense of the living standards of all future generations of Americas. No. In fact, they are fighting tooth and nail for the right to continue to steal more and more from the increasingly impoverished citizenry.

With the election right around the corner, this is what the banksters are up to now. From a Bloomberg article:

A banking trade group is preparing to set up a political fund that would allow members to funnel money anonymously to pro-industry candidates in the final months of the U.S. election campaign.

The American Bankers Association board is set to vote tomorrow on a plan to create a nonprofit that would donate to super-political action committees, or super-PACs, that can spend unlimited amounts on TV ads and other campaign activities.

Note what that said above. Bankers are setting up a non-profit to buy off politicians with anonymous donations. Oh yeah, this is going to turn out well for us. How are they able to do this?

Full Story Here…

[repost] Susanne Posel – Occupy Corporatism – September 27, 2012

Senator and self-proclaimed Zionist Joseph Lieberman declared that it was Iran who cyber-attacked Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase in 2011 and began with more frequency this year. Lieberman, as the chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee states that the financial attack was spurned from the state-sponsored anti-Muslim film circulating the Middle East thanks to CIA-operatives al-Qaeda.

Lieberman explains: “I don’t believe these were just hackers. I believe this was done by Iran and the Qods force, which has its own developing cyber-attack capacity. And I believe it was in response to the increasingly strong economic sanctions that the United States and our European allies have put on Iranian financial institutions.”

The US government is planting the propaganda seed that according to “highly classified” documents provided by the Join Chiefs of Staff’s Intelligence Directorate confirm that Iranian hackers are committing cyber-attacks against US financial institutions.

This report assures that US mega-banks are a “valid target” of the Iranian “cyber army”. However, the attackers used a known forum that is utilized by the CIA-controlled Anonymous to issue threats and brag about their successes.

Full Story Here…

By Danielle Douglas, Published: September 12

In the aftermath of one of the worst recessions in history, more Americans have limited or no interaction with banks, instead relying on check cashers and payday lenders to manage their finances, according to a new federal report.
Not only are these Americans more vulnerable to high fees and interest rates, but they are also cut off from credit to buy a car or a home or pay for college, the report from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said.

Full Story Here…

Full Show: Banking on Greed
July 13, 2012

Just when you think the reputation of banks couldn’t get any worse, comes word that we’ve seen nothing yet. As many as 20 banking institutions, including Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, UBS and HSBC, are reportedly under investigation for illegal and unethical practices toward protecting their profits at all costs and letting others pay for their mistakes. In this episode, financial expert Sheila Bair talks with Bill about the lawlessness of our banking system and the prognosis for meaningful reform. Bair was appointed in 2006 by President George W. Bush to chair the FDIC. During the 2008 meltdown, she argued that in some cases banks were NOT too big to fail — that instead of bailouts, they should be sold off to healthier competitors. Now a senior adviser to the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bair has organized a private group of financial experts including former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, former Senators Bill Bradley and Alan Simpson, and John Reed, once the chairman of Citicorp, to explore ways to prevent the banking industry from scuttling reforms created by the Dodd-Frank Act.

…snip…

Full Show: Banking on Greed – http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-banking-on-greed/

June 22, 2012
Matt Taibbi and Yves Smith discuss the folly and corruption of both banks and government. Also, Peter Edelman on fighting U.S. poverty.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s appearances in the last two weeks before Congressional committees — many members of which received campaign contributions from the megabank — beg the question: For how long and how many ways are average Americans going to pay the price for big bank hubris, with our own government acting as accomplice?

…snip…

http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-how-big-banks-victimize-our-democracy/