Hi all,

What do you all think of the news that Mortgage brokers are encouraging people to lie about their incomes to get an increased mortgage figure? I'm absolutely disgusted at this (especially as one company was quite a large, supposedly reputable company). What will happen when the interest rates go up and the people can't afford the monthly payments?

In my opinion, this will be the next MIG-type scandal. Misselling by the building societies/mortgage brokers to get their sales figures and when it all goes belly up they will deny all knowledge of any wrongdoing, even though we all know it goes on all the time.

If only I could warn people currently taking out a mortgage to avoid this pitfall. They will be the ones who suffer in the longrun, not the banks/BS/brokers.

Sorry, rant over for the day. It just makes my bloodboil that they get away with this kind of stuff and act as if they are squeaky clean.

Mel

-- Mel Trudgett (melanie.trudgett@ntlworld.com), October 29, 2003

Answers

Hi Mel,

I don't think they will be able to wriggle out with it quite so easily as it was televised the other night with hidden cameras.

However both the bank representative and the person who agreed to do this are comitting fraud and can both be equally charged as such.

Therefore I don't think it will appear as the same endowment, MIG mis- selling scandals as the person lying about their income is aware that they are doing so but could be tempted by getting a larger mortgage.

The word is that interest rates look as if they may shortly be rising. This does appear to be the case as many banks are now putting their 'fixed rate' mortgages slightly higher than they were a few months ago. I see worrying times ahead for many people who borrowed to their maximum and maybe didn't fix at that time. It's an awful problem.

-- Chris (chris@anon.co.uk), October 30, 2003.

I would advise you all to go to the www.fool.co.uk site and in particular the Property Market & Trends message boards, there is a lot of debate regarding this issue and property prices in general

-- John (sharky_john@hotmail.com), October 30, 2003.

Well it proves that even in these days of tighter regulation that even high street lender mortgage advisors dont provide best advice.

The lenders have blood on their hands in this. I cannot think of any justifyable reason why Birmingham Midshires would give a 95% Self Cert mortgage to a salaried person other than to give borrowers the opportunity to 'make the application fit'

When Self Cert products were released the intended market was for the self employed. Simply put, the lenders knew that self employed hide as much of their income as possible from the taxman and therefore on paper earn much less than they really take home. An employed person has no reason to self certify!

Regarding MIG how many lenders have previously denied that their staff simply told people to hand the keys in and everything would be ok - this now seems very credible!

-- fairer financial world (fairerfinancialworld@hotmail.com), October 30, 2003.

I believe they are called Predatory Lenders are they? I believe I was one of their victims. I am trying to learn about what to do right now. Any info would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. I am in South San Francisco, CA.

-- JUDY V C (JVCCH@YAHOO.COM), March 18, 2004.