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Working Paper
Debtor Fraud in Consumer Debt Renegotiation
We study how forcing financially distressed consumer debtors to repay a larger fraction of debt can lead them to misreport data fraudulently. Using a plausibly exogenous policy change that required debtors to increase repayment to creditors, we document that debtors manipulated data to avoid higher repayment. Consistent with deliberate fraud, data manipulators traveled farther to find more lenient insolvency professionals who, historically, approved more potentially fraudulent filings. Finally, we find that those debtors who misreported income had a lower probability of default on their debt ...
Journal Article
Fed provides tips on avoiding mortgage scams
The Fed has compiled some tips to help protect consumers from becoming victims of foreclosure avoidance scams. It's important for consumers to know that housing counselors and other resources are available at no or low cost to assist homeowners who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments.
Working Paper
Chargebacks: another payment card acceptance cost for merchants
Although chargebacks are perceived as one of the major cost components for merchants to accept card payments, little research has been conducted on them. To fill that gap, this paper describes the current chargeback landscape by generating detailed statistics on chargebacks for signature-based transactions. Our data are from merchant processors, which, altogether, processed more than 20 percent of all signature-based transactions in the United States. For Visa and MasterCard transactions, chargebacks merchants receive are, on average, 1.6 basis points (bps) of sales number and 6.5 bps of ...
Discussion Paper
The efficiency and integrity of payment card systems: industry views on the risks posed by data breaches
Consumer confidence in payment card systems has been built up over many decades. Cardholders expect to use their cards to execute payment instructions in a reliable and timely manner. Data breaches that degrade the perceived safety and reliability of payment cards may weaken consumer confidence in those systems and potentially cause cardholders to shift to other, and perhaps less efficient, forms of payment. A sizable shift away from payment cards ?induced by the consequences of one or more data breaches is unlikely. Even so, the probability of such an outcome is uncertain. In other words, ...
Journal Article
Taken to lunch
One lunch tab cost Jason Snyder more than $10,000 after information from the personal check he wrote was used to steal his identity. There are easy ways to reduce fraud.
Journal Article
Fraud containment
Working Paper
Owner-Occupancy Fraud and Mortgage Performance
We identify occupancy fraud — borrowers who misrepresent their occupancy status as owner-occupants rather than investors — in residential mortgage originations. Unlike previous work, we show that fraud was prevalent in originations not just during the housing bubble, but also persists through more recent times. We also demonstrate that fraud is broad-based and appears in government-sponsored enterprise and bank portfolio loans, not just in private securitization; these fraudulent borrowers make up one-third of the effective investor population. Occupancy fraud allows riskier borrowers to ...
Discussion Paper
Identity theft: do definitions still matter?
Despite a statutory definition of identity theft, there is a continuing debate on whether differences among the financial frauds associated with identity theft warrant further distinction and treatment, not only by lenders and financial institutions but also by consumers and regulatory and law enforcement agencies. In this Discussion Paper, Julia S. Cheney examines four types of financial fraud ? fictitious identity fraud, payment card fraud, account takeover fraud, and true name fraud ? that fall under the legal term identity theft to better understand how criminal behavior patterns, risks ...
Working Paper
The economics of the mutual fund trading scandal
I examine the economic incentives behind the mutual fund trading scandal, which made headlines in late 2003 with news that several asset management companies had arranged to allow abusive--and, in some cases, illegal--trades in their mutual funds. Most of the gains from these trades went to the traders who pursued market-timing and late-trading strategies. The costs were largely borne by buy-and-hold investors, and, eventually, by the management companies themselves. ; A puzzle emerges when one examines the scandal from the perspective of those management companies. In the short run, they ...