Banks Seize Homes in Unsecured Loans Scam

Fall behind with any credit repayments whatsoever and you can now loose your home..

BNP News Team

Greedy banks are using obscure legal powers to seize the homes of thousands of people who cannot pay their credit card bills — and worst of the lot is Northern Rock, bailed out with taxpayers’ money last year after near destruction at the hands of its ultra-greedy bosses. The Nationwide is the second worst offender.

Credit card companies are also in on the legalised theft, which involves serving the victims with little known court claims known as ‘charging orders’. In some cases, people owing as little as £1,000 have been hit with one of these legal instruments, which enable a creditor to order the sale of a property.

So much for the call by Yvette Cooper, chief secretary to the Treasury, for banks to allow people to keep their homes. According to the Ministry of Justice, 97,026 charging orders were granted by courts in England and Wales last year, a tenfold increase since 2000.

They allow financial institutions to order the sale of a property to pay off unsecured debts on credit cards, personal loans, store cards and car finance. Some will have been used only to threaten the debtor, or to levy a surcharge on the mortgage to recoup the debts.

While all householders know that their home is at risk if they fail to pay a secured loan such as a mortgage, no-one has ever been told when taking out an unsecured loan or using a credit card that their home is at risk if they fail to keep up with repayments.

The rate at which the courts have granted charging orders has increased sharply in the past two months, according to the National Debt-line. Alex McDermott, social policy officer at Citizens Advice, says the Government is ignoring a hidden scandal, because homes repossessed in this way did not appear in the official statistics issued by the Council for Mortgage Lenders.

And, far from stepping in to deal with the banksters and credit card loan sharks, the Government plans on making it even easier for them to seize peoples’ homes. From next year banks will no longer need to secure a county court judgment against a defaulting debtor. They will be able to move directly to seek a charging order after just two or three months of missed payments.

So when the banksters bring their institutions and the whole economy to the point of collapse, the political elite all band together to tell us that we have ‘no choice’ but to hand over £Billions in bail-outs. But when an ordinary decent family who are hit by the banksters’ credit crunch can’t pay a couple of bills, the Labour government and Tory opposition sit on their hands while they lose their home.

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