us briefly what led to your filing the complaint. well, i think you summarized it right there in the lead-in pretty well. we ve had a terrible hit here in arizona from home owners facing foreclosure. one statistic that was not part of your introduction was half of the mortgages in our state are under water. in other words the mortgage is more than the house is worth. so homeowners are stressed. many are in acute financial distress. investors are gone. there were a lot of investors in the hayday of easy money and the financial market. but now it s individual homeowners trying to hang on with everything they can to the home that their family lives in. that s who we re trying to stand up for and bank america is our number one servicer. what i can tell you is this. that the attorney general s office, we get more complaints about financial irregularities from bank america than from any other source. just give us an example. walk us through a human example of how this worked.
attorney general terry goddard, the man who filed one of those lawsuits. thank you so much for your time tonight. thank you. i think insane might be the right word. yeah. it s one of these things where, i don t know how many people are paying attention to this, but when you start to pay attention, the facts of the matter just seem like they re not possible. it seems like such an absolute chaotic, duplicitous situation. how did this first come to your attention? well, it s an avalanche in arizona. we ve had more second only to nevada in terms of the number of foreclosures per capita that we have in our state. so we ve been besieged. and bank of america is our largest servicer. so they stand at the front of the line in terms of responsibility. and at the back of the line in terms of their ability or their willingness to try to modify some of these loans. so they have the worst record on modification, and you ve just got a litany of what we hear every day at the attorney general
general terry godard. welcome. my pleasure. thank you. attorney general godard we d like to start if you could tell us briefly what led to your filing the complaint. well, i think you summarized it right there in the lead-in pretty well. we ve had a terrible hit here in arizona from home owners facing foreclosure. one statistic that was not part of your introduction was half of the mortgages in our state are under water. in other words the mortgage is more than the house is worth. so homeowners are stressed. many are in acute financial distress. investors are gone. there were a lot of investors in the hayday of easy money and the financial market. but now it s individual homeowners trying to hang on with everything they can to the home that their family lives in. that s who we re trying to stand up for and bank america is our number one servicer. what i can tell you is this. that the attorney general s office, we get more complaints about financial irregularities from bank americ
i think insane might be the right word. yeah. it s one of these things where, i don t know how many people are paying attention to this, but when you start to pay attention, the facts of matter just seem like they re not possible. it seems like such an absolute chaotic, duplicitous situation. how did this first come to your attention? well, it s an avalanche in arizona. we ve had more second only to nevada in terms of the number of foreclosures per capita that we have in our state. so we ve been besieged. and bank of america is our largest servicer. so they stand at the front of the line in terms of responsibility. and at the back of the line in terms of their ability or their willingness to try to modify some of these loans. so they have the worst record on modification, and you ve just got a litany of what we here every day at the attorney general s office, which is consumers are told, yes, we re listening, we re trying to modify your loan, at the same time, they re moving ah
attention? well, it s an avalanche in arizona. we ve had more second only to nevada in terms of the number of foreclosures per capita that we have in our state. so we ve been besieged. and bank of america is our largest servicer. so they stand at the front of the line in terms of responsibility. and at the back of the line in terms of their ability or their willingness to try to modify some of these loans. so they have the worst record on modification, and you ve just got a litany of what we here every day at the attorney general s office, which is consumers are told, yes, we re listening, we re trying to modify your loan, at the same time, they re moving ahead with foreclosure. and unfortunately, what you just read off is not unusual. i ve got here in my hand, and there are hundreds of more back in my office, as soon as we filed this lawsuit, we just overwhelmed with e-mails from people in similar situations. and not just from arizona, one