Bank of America has now admitted that it too rushed through the foreclosure process on thousands of homes – without reading the documents.

Here’s the eye-opening story on Yahoo News.

Those states affected by these actions are:
Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont and Wisconsin.

However, California is looking into possible violations of state consumer protection laws.

News from the New York Times today reveals that both JP Morgan Chase and GMAC are guilty of filing paperwork for foreclosures that may be fraudulent.

Thus, their foreclosures in 23 states have been put on hold until all the paperwork can be examined.

Why did this happen? Because they were in a hurry to get those foreclosures processed and done. So, in spite of the requirement to verify all information, they simply signed and filed summary judgments against homeowners without bothering to see if the paperwork was correct.

And guess what? That’s against the law.

Sadly, I doubt that anyone is shocked that the banks haven’t been following either banking regulations or contract law. They seem to think they’re above it all.

Homeowners are already lining up to file lawsuits, and attorneys are saying that the lenders in many cases don’t even have the paperwork to back up their claims. It seems things get lost in those big institutions.

Meanwhile, homes that have already been sold will be the subject of some of those lawsuits.

And where will that leave the innocent new owners?

Time will tell.

All they have to do is choose a long-tail keyword that is somehow related to your site, and optimize for it. A quick keyword search, even with free keyword search tools, will show you long tail keywords that no one else is optimizing for. And if you don’t find any, you can easily make them up.

The trouble is, hardly anyone is searching for them – but these scammers don’t promise visitors – they only promise page one of Google.That’s how they can operate without being labeled as fraudulent.

If you check them out, you’ll notice that YOU don’t get to choose the keywords. They may tell you that it’s best if their “experts” do it for you – what a crock! It’s best alright – for them!

I’ll bet anyone reading this could quickly and easily optimize a site for Page one place ment if the keyword was a longtail like this: “jewel encrusted leather collars for 15# poodles.” How about this: “Birthday cards for 6-year old Asian-American girls.”

See what I mean? Finding a long tail keyword that no one searches for is easy as falling off a log – and I can tell you from experience that takes no effort at all!

So, don’t buy in to any of those wild promises. Just keep working on your site, adding content, optimizing for keywords you KNOW your prospects are searching for, and building a reputation that will give you plenty of referral traffic.

You might also look into joining Twitter to get more exposure. Come join me there and see how much fun it is – and how much you can learn while you’re at it. The only danger is spending too much time following links.

Generally I just delete each of them without looking, but tonight I scrolled down and scanned one of those messages. Those identity thieves are really bold! They were asking for everything, including the 3 digits on the back of my credit card. That particular message told me that because of suspicious activity, they had locked my account until they heard from me.

I don’t know what the penalty for identity theft is, but I would guess it is considered a serious crime – so the potential rewards of this nasty scam must be very high. And, here’s the sad part, they must get enough response from those bogus emails to make it worth the risk.

If you have people in your address book who might not be aware of phishing – and who might possibly respond to one of these messages – I hope you’ll take a few minutes to warn them.

The way some of the messages are written, a person could panic and respond if they didn’t know better.

One of them I received today was a dire warning that I needed to contact them immediately because my account had been compromised.

By the way, if you want to help stop the phishing, forward those emails to the FTC at spam@uce.gov

Here’s to honest prosperity!

Marte

I didn’t count, but it was about 6 or 8 pages long, showed copies of the big checks people are receiving, and told how easy it all was. All you have to do is find the deals, convince the people to sell for ten cents on the dollar, and then this guy would buy the stuff, re-sell it, and give you half the profit.

Easy work, right? Somewhere in the letter he mentioned that he spent thousands every month to gather the contact info for the people you need to talk to – but I didn’t notice anywhere that he said he’d give you that info. Only that he had it.

Anyway, out of curiosity, I decided to Google him and the business.

Oh boy! All I can say is that it’s too bad the people who wrote about him hadn’t done the same before they forked over their cash.

That’s the second time in the past month or so that I’ve gotten something really persuasive in the mail and Googled it – to find that it was a complete scam.

If everyone would do that before they bought into these schemes, that kind of business would be out of business in short order.

And why doesn’t everyone do it? Within just a few minutes you can find out if something is for real or not.

As well as doing a search, there’s a website called www.ripoffreport.com where you can research all sorts of businesses you might be considering using. I got acquainted with it when I did some work for Hollywood Hair – he had me go see the reports people had posted about his biggest competitors.

Once I got there, I went exploring, and it was an eye-opener. Of course, some of the reports were silly. For instance, someone had written that Melaleuca products were no good because some people are allergic to them. Well duh – some people are allergic to almost anything you could name. So, you have to pay attention to what the complaints actually say.

If you’re thinking about getting involved with a business opportunity, or even considering buying from a new company, use this tool we call the internet. You’ll save your sanity and your money too!

Best success,
Marte