What is it like being a whistleblower?

At the time I leaked the information, people didn’t really understand what had happened. Although BankofAmericaSuck has since expired and gone black, you can still find the leak listed on my Page on WordPress.

The long story short is that it all involved a small shadowy corner of mortgage and insurance called Force-Placed Insurance. What I learned from the experience is that nobody knows anything about their mortgage, car loan, or insurance – the 3 largest bills in their lives, and so much more guaranteed these days than death and taxes. In short, nobody realized they couldn’t see their required insurance information on their loan statements. Nobody noticed they couldn’t see their escrow balance. People weren’t paying attention, and the banks were ripping them off.

While the general public and media largely seemed not to understand what was happening, I was able to successfully explain it, and affect regulation. I’m still very much working on putting a stop to bank fraud, toppling a “too big to fail” bank, and bringing justice to the world. Here’s some of the legislation I not only motivated with this document leak, but personally involved myself in over the last three years:

Ben Lawsky and Joy Feigenbaum at the New York Dept of Financial Services: Page on Ny | Paraphrasing Bank of America’s Testimony to the NY Department of Financial Services

The Federal Housing Finance Agency: Page on Fhfa |  My Meeting With the FHFA |  What I Told the FHFA

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Consumer Financial Bureau Soliciting Feedback On Mortgage Servicing Regulations

There were more, but I don’t really feel like looking the rest up. The general idea is that what I thought would be fixed with a simple document drop #Anonymous-style, turned into three long years of working alone and for free. I ended up becoming a blogger and consultant, and have been able to scrape by a living. I’m now not only working with the government to fight the banks, but I’m working with Anonymous to protest them both.

If you want to know more about mortgages, insurance, and how to fix the housing crisis, I explained it on HuffPost Live earlier this year: HuffPost Live

If you want to see what happens to a normal man when he blows the whistle on the banks and ends up on terrorist watch lists, I explained that on the news too: HuffPost Live

Otherwise, search force-placed insurance, insurance tracking, or check out my blog: A Day in the Life of a Whistleblower…

***edit 12/2/15 – a lot of the links posted here are now dead, but here’s my current blog, and the knowledge is all still in my head (and my hard drives) regardless of the lengths they go to silence me: Page on thoughtforyourpenny.com

Also, my crusade made it into the January 2016 issue of High Times: HIGH TIMES Issue Preview: Pot & Sex***