Uh, no. Although people do have “Mortgage Burning Parties.” In fact, take, for example, this little tale from the LA Times:
When he was a kid in Elmira, N.Y., title attorney James Wytock lived near a church that decided to hold a combination service-ceremony to commemorate paying off its mortgage.
• Nah nah nah, kids are circumventing anti-Myspace filters by setting up their own proxy servers from home and accessing them at school.
We haven’t been able to determine to what degree the identify theft letters from mortgage companies are legit. But thanks to an astute reader ‘fotonique,’ we’ve discovered what might be the source of the letters being sent out from other mortgage companies, including ABN-AMRO.
This is potentially heinous. Ed writes:
Attached is a copy of a letter sent to me most recently by Countrywide, my mortgage holder for some years now, but also by another company, a mortgage broker, from NJ with whom I am not affiliated (they implied I was a customer). [Ed’s qualified with us that he got the exact same letter from two separate companies. -Other Ed.] I unfortunately threw the other one away in disgust after calling them and finally harassing them until they admitted that it was just a marketing ploy. The fact is that their claim that one of their employees ripped off identities of applicants is a complete fabrication and a scam to get you to sign up for their identity theft insurance products (the first year is free, oh yeah I’m sure). The fact that large financial services companies are blatantly lying to their own customers is mind boggling even in this day and age. Try calling the number here and speaking to the Zuckerman woman, or ask the name of the law enforcement agency they reference. What blatant bullshit.
We did call the company, but they wouldn’t give us any details about which organization they were working with to solve the ‘problem.’ We were told that if we had an account with Countrywide, they could look at our account to see if we had been affected by the (presumably apocryphal) rogue employee.
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