Nationstar didn’t respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dunkley contends that the company began overcharging her for interest, charged late fees and other charges, and in recent weeks\u00a0has threatened her with foreclosure. She has received numerous debt collection phone calls, sometimes as early as 5 a.m., according to the lawsuit. Over the last two years, she has battled with the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Under the SCRA, a 6 percent cap applies to loans that service members incurred before entering active duty \u2014 whether that’s Guard and Reserve members called to active duty\u00a0or service members who took out their loans before entering the military. If the service member’s interest rate is higher than 6 percent, the service member can request the reduction to 6 percent by providing written notice and a copy of military orders to the creditor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
Dunkley bought her house in Topeka, Kansas, in July\u00a02008\u00a0with a mortgage loan rate of 6.5 percent, when she was a civilian.\u00a0In July\u00a02009, she was commissioned as an officer in the Kansas Army National Guard. In 2011, she deployed to Afghanistan, serving as a judge advocate, and requested the interest rate reduction from Bank of America, which was servicing her loan at the time. It reduced the rate to 6 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In September\u00a02012, after applying to transfer to full-time active duty in the Army, she left the Guard and became an active-duty Army officer the next day. All this time, the mortgage servicing companies continued to allow her the 6 percent rate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mortgage servicing companies, often separate from the mortgage lender, handle the routine tasks of managing the loan, such as collecting the payments from the borrower\u00a0and handling the escrow account associated with the loan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Nationstar Mortgage took over the servicing of her loan in June\u00a02013, it continued to honor the 6 percent rate. But in May\u00a02014, Dunkley alleges, Nationstar said she was no longer entitled to the protections of the SCRA\u00a0because her orders didn’t have an “end date” or termination date\u00a0despite the fact that she is an active-duty officer. Since that time, Dunkley “has written countless letters, sent innumerable faxes and emails and endured dozens of telephone calls from the defendant concerning the interest rate on her promissory note and her payments on the debt,” according to the lawsuit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The various responses [Dunkley] has received directing her to submit and re-submit her orders and other documents to [Nationstar] make it abundantly clear that no one who understands anything about the SCRA is reading her letters and\/or emails, because the responses are either generic computer-generated responses, or do not in any way respond to the correspondence they reference,” the lawsuit states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If financial institutions are not including specifics about the SCRA in their policies and procedures, and if they haven’t conducted training for their personnel, these financial institutions could wind up in the same “death spiral” that\u00a0some banks found themselves in during the past decade, said John Odom, a retired Air Force colonel\u00a0and one of the attorneys representing Dunkley. One of the results was the SCRA portion of the 2012 settlement known as the National Mortgage Settlement, in which 2,413 service members received a share in a settlement of more than $311 million from mortgage servicers JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi, GMAC Mortgage and Bank of America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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