Foreclosure via Facebook
The most distressing content most of us have ever seen on Facebook falls within the realm of the overshare: your boss’s Vegas stag party pics, or your new boyfriend’s status change from single to “it’s complicated.” But there’s a trend toward much more distressing messages being delivered via the social network: foreclosure notices.
The phenomenon started in 2008, when an Australian court allowed — no, ordered — a lender who was attempting to foreclose on a home to serve notice on the defaulting borrowers via Facebook, as well as at their Canberra home and a backup physical address. Since then, attorneys in New Zealand, Canada, and, this spring, East Sussex, England, have all authorized mortgage lenders and their attorneys to serve borrowers with foreclosure notices via Facebook, when the borrowers could not otherwise be located.
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Both the English and Australian instances of foreclosure via Facebook seem to have accurately hit their targets: Both borrowers reacted to the service almost immediately. Attorney Archie Tsirimokos, whose firm represented the lender in the Australian case, told Bloomberg that the borrowers tightened their privacy settings within a day of receiving the notice via Facebook, giving lawyers the proof the court required to allow them to repossess and sell the property. And in the British case, the attorney who served the foreclosure notice via a Facebook direct message reported that it took “a matter of minutes for the debtor to respond to the e-mail,” allowing the foreclosure case to proceed.
Read more:
http://moneyland.time.com/2011/07/11/social-networking-gone-wild-foreclosure-via-facebook/#ixzz1SUOjCepY
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