Pedestrians walk past a Bank of America sign on the street in New York March 8, 2011. The bank's CEO Brian Moynihan said he is not interested in major acquisitions, and that the bank will not have any appreciable asset growth for the next five years. Bank of America's assets averaged $2.44 trillion in 2010, ending the year at $2.26 trillion.
The group of online activists known as "Anonymous" has released a batch of e-mail concerning Bank of America that was given to the group by a whistleblower who worked for a related mortgage and vehicle loan insurer.
The e-mail purportedly comes from a seven-year employee of Balboa Insurance, a company that provides insurance to financial institutions in the mortgage and vehicle finance markets. Balboa was a unit of Countrywide Financial, which Bank of America acquired in 2008. Bank of America said in February it would sell Balboa to QBE Insurance Group.
The former Balboa employee alleges that the e-mail trail indicates that Balboa withheld certain foreclosure information from U.S. federal auditors during the takeovers of the financial institution IndyMac, which the U.S. federal government seized in July 2008, and Aurora Loan Services, a mortgage loan company that was a subsidiary of Lehman Brothers, the failed investment bank. The person also alleges that loan documentation was falsified in order to proceed with foreclosures.
Bank of America officials could not be immediately reached for comment.
Anonymous has conducted a range of distributed denial-of-service attacks against websites seen as unsympathetic to the WikiLeaks website as well as many other targets for its campaigns, which have included the Church of Scientology and the music royalty company BMI.
The documents, which consist of a series of e-mails and correspondence between Anonymous and the whistleblower, were posted on a domain called www.bankofamericasuck.com, which now appears offline.
Google's cache of the website, however, is still available. Google's snapshot of the website was taken around 6 a.m. GMT.
The domain was registered through the company GoDaddy in December by a person named "James Jophan" of California. The listed phone number, however, has been disconnected. Although people who register a domain name are required to give contact details, which are listed in so-called "whois" directories," the information is often intentionally inaccurate.
Although bankofamericasuck.com is now down, it does appear the material is getting widely distributed through other domains posted on social networking services such as Twitter.
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