The Office of the Maine Attorney General will receive about $30,000 from a national $10 million settlement over an improper mortgage processing test that inadvertently withdrew more than $2 billion from mortgage holders.
ACI Payments, a subsidiary of ACI Worldwide Corp., is a payment processor for third-party clients, including mortgage servicers, the attorney general’s office said in a statement Tuesday. One of those clients was Nationstar Mortgage, known publicly as Mr. Cooper. ACI was testing an automatic check clearing software on April 23, 2021, when it mistakenly submitted live Mr. Cooper consumer data into the system. That resulted in ACI erroneously attempting to withdraw mortgage payments from hundreds of thousands of customers named Mr. Cooper on a day that was not authorized or expected.
While the vast majority of withdrawals did not ultimately go through or were reversed, 1.4 million transactions totaling $2.3 billion were processed, affecting 477,000 Mr. Cooper customers. Impacted consumers have received restitution from ACI and through other related settlements.
“Institutions that withdraw directly from our bank accounts for critical expenses like mortgages hold extreme power and must be held to accordingly high standards,” said Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey, who was one of 50 attorneys general participating in the investigation and settlement. “This settlement is the culmination of partnership with the Maine Bureau of Consumer Credit Protection, and I am proud to have collaborated with them to protect Mainer’s financial assets.”
The settlement also requires ACI to take steps to avoid any future incidents, including requiring ACI to use artificially created data rather than real consumer data when testing systems or software, and requiring ACI to segregate any testing or development work from its consumer payment systems.
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