A member of the online collective Anonymous has published e-mails it was handed by someone claiming to be a former Bank of America employee that purport to show the suspect removal of mortgage insurance information from databases.
An Anonymous member, using the Twitter name @OperationLeakS has posted the internal e-mails and his correspondence with the leaker on the bankofamericasucks.com Web site.
The leaker says he worked for seven years at Balboa Insurance, which used to be owned by Bank of America, and calls the bank a "cult" that is trying to destroy his career.
He claims that Balboa and BofA unit Countrywide knowingly hid foreclosure information from federal auditors during the government takeovers of OneWest subsidiary IndyMac Federal and Lehman unit Aurora Loan Services.
The source also accuses Balboa of "falsifying loan documentation in order to proceed with foreclosures by fixing letter cycles in the system, reporting incorrect volumes of all their lenders and to the federal auditors to avoid fines for falling behind on Loan Modifications, purposely and knowingly adjusting premiums for REO (Real Estate Owned) insurance for their corporate clients while denying forbearances for individual borrowers".
To back up the claims, screenshots of what the source claims to be internal e-mails from last November have been posted.
These show a request from "Jason Vaughn, operations team manager, Balboa" asking for document tracking numbers (DTNs) to be removed from the Balboa Rembrandt insurance tracking system. A response informs him that although the DTNs cannot be removed, the loan numbers can be, meaning documents will not match to the loans.
No reason is provided for why the details should be removed but Vaughn then asks "why are we removing all record of this error?" and warns about paper trails that could be a "red flag" to auditors, concluding "this just doesn't seem right to me".
A Bank of America spokesman told Reuters yesterday that the documents were stolen by a former Balboa Insurance employee and were not related to foreclosures. "We are confident that his extravagant assertions are untrue," Reuters was told.
Bank of America has been bracing itself for a data leak from WikiLeaks, which revealed last year that it has thousands of internal documents from a major financial institution. The whistle blowing Web site's founder Julian Assange had promised the leak early this year but has yet to deliver.
Anonymous has been supportive of WikiLeaks and recently launched a cyber-attack on security firm HBGary. This was in retaliation for an interview given to the Financial Times by the company's COO Aaron Barr in which he claimed to have used clues on social networking sites to identify key members of the collective.
The attack led to the disclosure of a document outlining a plan of attack on WikiLeaks, allegedly put together by HBGary and two other firms acting on behalf of a law firm representing Bank of America.