When a person loses money and gets nothing in return they want to try to recover those funds. However, it also reveals an even more sinister level of fraud that operates under the pretense that it can recover previously lost funds. There are many aspects to these scams.
Since the economy is so bad, people are often falling victim to foreclosure and mortgage fraud recovery scams due to the housing market. Many current homeowners are facing financial problems due to loss of income and find they cannot meet their current mortgage payments. These people are doing everything they can to keep their bank from foreclosing on their homes.
Some of these folks have had help refused to them by their bank or mortgage company and will try anything to keep their home. Scammers find their “marks” through e-mail, phone, newspaper, or Internet ads and offer to help them find refinancing or to modify their home loans. The one thing you should look for is if they ask you to pay a large fee straight off the bat.
The problem lies in the fact that these scammers have no way to help them out with their mortgage at all. After paying a negotiating fee, the homeowner finds him or herself without any assistance but, rather, out money they could not afford. They are told not to contact the lender, attorneys, or anyone else and especially not to reply to court or bank correspondence. Once the homeowner is subjected to this scam, they’re left with a foreclosed home and nothing that they can do to stop it.
‘Credit recovery’ is another type of common scam that you can run into, wherein scam artists step in and state that they’ll talk to your credit card companies for you in order to improve your credit or the rate in which you’ll have to pay. The person is to pay their monthly payments to the scammer who is, in return, supposed to pay the loan company; but this doesn’t usually happen.
When people use the ‘credit recovery’ program they soon find that their creditors received no money at all and the scammers kept every bit of it. Also, your late fees and interest will accumulate, putting you in further trouble with your creditors. For the most part, you can rest assured that a credit card company will work with you in the event you need your terms renegotiated.
If you need assistance with your financial issues, you should take steps to avoid getting scammed. Watch out for red flags like a large upfront fee, being told not to seek legal counsel, being required to sign documents you don’t understand, etc. These are all sure warning signs that something is not right. There will always be people out there willing to steal from those who work hard for their money, so always be careful when a deal sounds too good to be true; odds are, it is.
