STEPHEN PFLEGER: When we think about white collar crime, we tend to think of, well, it's just money. This case was very different. In fact, this case was very similar to the impact that violent crime has on victims.
LAURA ROTTENBORN: In 2009, the U.S. Government announced a program that would allow American homeowners who were suffering financial distress to apply for a reduced monthly mortgage payment. And so SunTrust Mortgage solicited its customers to apply for the HAMP program.
STEPHEN PFLEGER: A lot of these people thought, "Okay, I want to take a shot with this, because I really want to stay in my house."
LAURA ROTTENBORN: Homeowners who came into the program ended up being strung along for months, and in some cases years. Some of the victims saw an obliteration of their credit scores. Some of the victims actually had their homes improperly foreclosed upon. We talked to victims who experienced divorce because the financial stress was so intense that their relationship simply couldn't survive it.
STEPHEN PFLEGER: It was not long after we started to talk to a variety of victims that we realized how many people had been hurt and how serious that damage was for so many of them.
LAURA ROTTENBORN: We uncovered evidence that SunTrust knew that the representations it was making to its customers could not possibly be true. We identified 32,685 victims. We wanted to create a restitution model that would get as many of those victims as close to full restitution as possible.
STEPHEN PFLEGER: We convinced SunTrust to take a step forward and recognize that what they had done was wrong.
LAURA ROTTENBORN: And so this settlement was designed to also compensate both the acute emotional harm and the stress and then also some of the financial hardship that these people suffered.
STEPHEN PFLEGER: It was very clear to us early on that if we did not do this work, that almost all of these victims would never get any kind of recovery. And this was just a unique opportunity to make that happen. And that's extremely satisfying.
