Korea`s largest bank Kookmin has had 3,000 cases of document manipulation in applications for collective loans for intermediate payment.
The bank said five people recently filed a petition to police after suffering losses from manipulation of related documents by bank staff, and has launched an investigation into similar cases.
According to the Financial Supervisory Service and the bank, Kookmin probed between the end of last month and Aug. 10 manipulation cases on 200,000 collective loans for intermediate payment on 850 reconstruction and redevelopment apartment sites, and discovered more than 3,000 fraud cases.
According to the bank`s findings, most cases involved employee manipulation of the expiration date of collective loans for intermediate payment. In the past, three years of maturity have typically been written for collective loans for intermediate payment regardless of when the borrower would move to the house. If the bank`s headquarters reduced the time to 26 or 27 months, however, bank employees would scrape out the number and put in three years again.
If the lending period is shorter than the date written in the contract, the borrower would be pressured for repayment. Collective loans for intermediate payment are shifted to lending with home collateral. So a person can move into a house before the lending maturity expires, but failure to move in within the time frame would mean he or she must make the intermediate payment because it is not shifted to a home equity loan.
Since the number of manipulation cases was bigger than expected, a massive filing of lawsuits is likely. Fraud was considerable in cases of apartments that people had signed contracts on, an area that has seen many conflicts between builders and banks.
A financial regulatory source said, "Document manipulation cases, if identified, will raise the number of lawsuits by residents."
