Consumer complaint received 2024-09-20 00:00:00
Product: Mortgage — FHA mortgage
Issue: Struggling to pay mortgage — Trying to communicate with the company to fix an issue related to modification, forbearance, short sale, deed-in-lieu, bankruptcy, or foreclosure
Company: Selene Holdings LLC
State: TX

Complaint narrative:
Selene Finance has engaged in unethical servicing practices while manipulating my payment history and creating a false narrative of default in order to wrongfully and illegally foreclose on my home with a sale date of XX/XX/XXXX. I have an FHA mortgage loan that is backed by the federal government and Selene Finance is REQUIRED to conduct an evaluation to determine my ability to pay PRIOR to any type of foreclosure activity. FHA requires Selene Finance as a servicer of this FHA loan to allow access to all programs available to distressed borrowers but this never happened because Selene took liberties with their accounting practices and created a false narrative that my VOLUNTARY mortgage payments made OUTSIDE of my bankruptcy were in default even though I have direct evidence that they were not. The problem is that instead of considering these voluntary payments a separate matter, their accounting department somehow determined that one of the payments was late, so they decided to accelerate and demand all past due payments from two years prior even though they were part of an active bankruptcy. 

My wife and I bought our home in XXXX with XXXX  XXXX. We never had any problems until XXXX hit and negatively impacted our income when my work shut down and XXXX offered us the CARES forbearance as required due to this being an FHA loan. We appreciated the help and recovered and resumed making our regular payment and then the loan got transferred to your company. In XXXX I began suffering from XXXX  XXXX XXXX  and was missing a lot of time at work. Not long after that my terminally ill father was unable to care for himself and I spent a lot of time helping out until he passed. Due to the missed time from work I fell behind on the monthly mortgage payment again. I reached out to Selene to begin the process of getting reviewed for assistance programs that are supposed to be available to distressed FHA borrowers but got a lot of runaround and red tape, a much different experience than XXXX. It became very frustrating and we were about 5 months behind so we decided to file XXXX  XXXX bankruptcy to restructure our debt that way. I began making the payments to the bankruptcy trustee as agreed for about XXXX years. We slowly were paying down the arrearages and in XX/XX/XXXX the XXXX trustee statement said we only owed {$5800.00}. At that time our XXXX Attorney suggested that we should begin making the full monthly mortgage payment of {$1800.00} directly to Selene, while still making the required bankruptcy trustee payment. This was a voluntary decision, made in good faith to try to accelerate getting back into good standing with Selene Finance since our hardship had been resolved and my wife and I were both working full time. I made these voluntary payments to Selene for close to a year each month in order to demonstrate good will and pay down the amount in the bankruptcy. ( Bank statement receipts provided ) Selene claimed that the voluntary payment made in XX/XX/XXXX did not post to Selene within the calendar month thus it was considered late and Selene said they would not post it for XX/XX/XXXX and would instead apply the payment to the oldest past due payment, which triggered a default even though we were in XXXX  XXXX bankruptcy protection. We had made all XXXX trustee payments as agreed for XXXX years and also paid the full monthly mortgage payment for 9 months. Our XXXX payment posted on XX/XX/XXXX, and XXXX days later Selene Finance filed a Notice of Default. ( Attached ) Selene was looking for any chance or excuse to try and steal our equity. There was no moral or legal basis for Selene Finance to file foreclosure paperwork against me when I was in active bankruptcy and making my payments as agreed and ALSO paying the current full monthly payment. Technically I was only 30 days late on the XXXX payment because the mortgage arrearages were in bankruptcy protection. This is unethical and illegal

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation