We at ScamFraudAlert have observed that there have been a significant number of complaints against Vanderbilt Mortgage & Finance Company. Everyone has the right to state their side of the story. This forum allows both.

http://www.vmf.com/

See RipoffReport.com

A consumer complaint.
Vanderbilt Mortgage And Finance
Address:
500 Alcoa Trail
Maryville Tennessee 37804
U.S.A.
Phone Number:
800-970 7250

We started having problems from the very beginning of our ordeal. The people who have their home financed with Vanderbilt are deceased, which is my mother n law and her husband. My husband is the executor of the estate. We have had to endure many rude phone calls over the past two years. In the middle of acquiring this estate, my husband was deployed to the Middle East.

We continued to make the payments while he was deployed and all the while he was gone they continued to call and harrass all of the family members they could find numbers for to include myself, my husband's brother, and my father who has nothing to do with this estate what so ever. They also called my minor child and yelled at him and called him a liar. Then to make matters worst they sent a representative to our personal home in WA state to take our home. The house they have financed is in Texas. In the meantime we have told them endless times we have a buyer for it, and is being sold through a reputable realtor. It is due to close in the middle of July. Sadly the soldiers sailor relief act doesn't cover this estate. Only personal finance of soldiers. They continue to call my husband at his job and we had to have caller ID put in so we could avoid answering the phone.

Lora
Everson, Washington
U.S.A.

http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff148469.htm

Posted on Sun, Nov. 12, 2006
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Suit accuses lender of harassment
But prefab-homefinance company says there’s no evidence it did anything illegal
By DAVID WREN
dwren@thesunnews.com

Horry County residents have filed two class-action lawsuits against Vanderbilt Mortgage and Finance Inc., accusing one of the nation’s largest manufactured-home lenders of making harassing telephone calls to collect monthly payments that were not late and forcing customers to buy expensive homeowners insurance sold through the company.

Vanderbilt, a mortgage company affiliated with Clayton Homes, denies the allegations and has asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuits, saying there is no evidence the company did anything illegal.

“Vanderbilt operates within the law, and we look forward to our day in court, if it comes to that,” said Rush Smith, a Columbia lawyer who represents Vanderbilt and Clayton Homes. “We feel confident we will be vindicated.”

David Breen, a lawyer representing two Horry County homeowners in one of the lawsuits, said he hopes the class-action lawsuits will help homeowners nationwide stop abuses by the manufactured-home finance leader.

Decisions made in the two cases could apply to all of Vanderbilt’s 290,000 customers nationwide.

“The harassment creates pretty severe emotional stress, quite a bit of marital strife and problems at work because the boss wonders why his worker is getting so many phone calls,” Breen said. “What you have is a big company terrorizing the little guy. And if they’re doing it to my clients, they’re probably doing it to a lot of people.”

Rebecca Peters-Mone of Conway says Vanderbilt representatives called her as often as eight times a day asking her to make a payment even when her mortgage was not past due but was in a grace period before late fees could be assessed.

“They would call me at all hours of the day, while I was at work, on my cellular phone and my telephone at home,” Peters-Mone said. “I would return their calls and tell them when I was going to make a payment, and they would call me even on the day that I was making a payment.”

Peters-Mone started keeping a written log of Vanderbilt’s telephone calls, which shows the mortgage company called her 260 times over a 12-month period starting in November 2004. The log shows Vanderbilt called her 76 times in March 2005. The telephone calls during the 12-month period started as early as 8:15 a.m. and lasted as late as 8:23 p.m.

Federal law allows debt collectors to call customers between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m., but debt collectors are not allowed to call customers several times in one day, and they cannot use the telephone to harass debtors.

Smith, the Vanderbilt lawyer, said the company does not violate the law with its phone calls to debtors.

In addition to the frequent calls, Peters-Mone said Vanderbilt representatives were rude and demeaning.

“I have perfect credit, but every time they called, they would try to make me feel like a deadbeat, even though my payment wasn’t late,” she said.

Stacey Dalbec of Myrtle Beach says in court papers that Vanderbilt shouldn’t have been calling her at all, because she was not late with her mortgage payments.

Dalbec’s mortgage was due the first of each month, but Vanderbilt gave her an 11-day grace period before it considered the payment past due and added late fees.

Dalbec could not be reached for comment last week, but she detailed her experiences with Vanderbilt in an affidavit included with court filings.

When Vanderbilt couldn’t get Dalbec on the phone, the company’s representatives called Dalbec’s mother in Columbia, according to court documents.

Breen, who represents Peters-Mone and Dalbec, said Vanderbilt calls customers’ relatives in attempts to collect monthly mortgage payments.

Federal law allows debt collectors to contact relatives and other third parties, but only to get a debtor’s phone number or find out where a debtor lives and works. Debt collectors are not allowed to disclose nonpublic information about a loan to third parties. That includes telling someone that their relative’s debt is past due.

The second lawsuit, which includes six Horry County residents and four people from Florence and Summerville, also alleges that Vanderbilt harassed and threatened customers over payments.

That lawsuit also says Vanderbilt forced some customers to pay for expensive homeowners insurance they didn’t need. Those customers said they already had homeowners insurance through different companies.

Those homeowners also are suing American Bankers Insurance Co. of Florida, which provided the insurance coverage through Vanderbilt.

The lawsuit stems from a practice known as “force-placed insurance,” which occurs when a lender takes out an insurance policy to protect its interest in a home or automobile. Lenders then charge the cost of the insurance to the owner of the home or car.

Lenders typically do that when a home or car owner fails to get his or her own policy, and the force-placed insurance almost always is more expensive than insurance consumers can get themselves.

The lawsuit says Vanderbilt force-placed insurance on customers, even when the company knew those customers had their own policies. Vanderbilt did that, the lawsuit says, because it received commissions on the force-placed policies.

When some of Vanderbilt’s customers failed to pay or refused to pay for the insurance, the lawsuit says Vanderbilt added late fees to their mortgage payments, continued to bill them for the unnecessary insurance or threatened to foreclose on their homes.

Vanderbilt denies the allegations and has asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit.

Efforts last week to reach lawyers representing consumers in that case were unsuccessful.

David Wren is a reporter for The (Myrtle Beach) Sun News, a McClatchy newspaper

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate...e/15990030.htm

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No Private Right of Action Under GLBA; Repeated Dunning Calls Do Not Constitute Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress; No Duty to Wait for Grace Period to Run Before Initiating Collection Calls.

In Peters-Mone v. Clayton Homes, Inc., et al., C.A. No. 4:06-CV-1326-TLW (D.S.C. opinion Jan. 9, 2007), the plaintiffs sued a debt collector, asserting that its dunning calls – allegedly made after the payment due date but before the end of the late charge grace period – violated state and federal statutes and common law principles. The defendant filed a motion to dismiss all the claims which was granted. Among the more significant bases for dismissal, the Court dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), the FTC Act, and a South Carolina law prohibiting obscene and threatening phone calls, finding that no private right of action exists under those statutes. The Court also dismissed the plaintiffs’ negligence claims, finding no common law duty to wait for the grace period to run before calling on the debt. In addition, the Court dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims for intentional infliction of emotional distress because it determined that repeated collection calls – as many as eight a day – do not constitute the sort of extreme or outrageous conduct capable of supporting such a claim. The Court denied the plaintiffs’ implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing claim because that covenant is extinguished when the borrower defaults. Finally, the Court dismissed the plaintiffs’ breach of confidence claim on the basis that South Carolina does not consider the creditor-debtor relationship to be a fiduciary relationship.