Real Estate: September 2005 Archives

As much as I am aware of common problems in the fields in which I intend to work (or enable others to work), I can't know everything that goes on. To that end, I'm soliciting the aid of the public. Email me your own horror stories. The ones that are common, I will likely post amalgams (in other words, nobody's individual story, but rather a put together one made up of parts of many basically consistent individual ones). The ones that are outstanding, I'll likely post after redacting individually identifying information.



Send these to "dm" at the domain name, searchlightcrusade.com (I try to frustrate web crawlers looking for spam recipients to the maximum extent possible, so keep standard email rules in mind when compressing the above. No spaces. @symbol. Ignore stuff that needs to be ignored).



Please include:



Your relationship to those it happened to, if not obvious.



Contact e-mail for you and for the victim (My intent is to ask that the person it happened to verify I've removed the individual information sufficiently BEFORE I post the story, if I do intend to post)



All information as in-line text. Attachments will not be opened!



A simple statement saying that I have your permission to remove personal information and post, or that I do not have your permission to post, as you are sending me this information for background purposes only (i.e. so I know it goes on, and can research and write my own thing from there - still a quite useful bit of illumination).



Please do not get upset if I don't use your individual story immediately. Certain ones I've already encountered many times over. Others may be worthy of attention, but are subject to the limitation that I only get the same twenty-four hours of the day that anyone else does, and in that time, I've got to earn a living for my family at my profession, as well as live up to my other responsibilities to the people most important in the world to me, as well as have a bit of fun lest I go insane.



I am primarily interested in horror stories in the fields of mortgage, buying and selling of real estate, the sales of insurance of all kinds, and of things relating to financial planning and investment advice. I know I said I'm interested in insurance, but don't send me stories of how your insurance won't cover this or that, UNLESS it was specifically represented to you that it was at the time of sale. I'm also interested in expanding this to cover various fields of the law and consulting, but I do not possess professional qualifications there, and until someone steps forward who does, my ability to deal with them is limited. I hope to eventually expand this blog to cover all consumer and small business services, so I am interested in almost any story. At a minimum, I can post it in Horror Stories as a warning to the readers of this site not to make the same mistakes.



I do intend to add value to these stories, suggesting red flags for this sort of behavior and strategies to avoid or deal with problems. The idea is not to laugh at people for making mistakes that anyone can make, but to look at what happened with an eye to keep it from happening to other people.



One last word: This is not revenge.com, and it most certainly is not libel.com If you DON'T want me to remove all individually identifying information, including of the low down good-for-nothing dirty rat that did this to you, you're going to have to furnish me with identifying details, documentation, and everything else that you'd expect a fraud investigator to ask for. Basically what you'd need to convict the culprits in a criminal court, and maybe a lot more. Don't send it until I ask for it, however. The point of this site is to educate consumers and provide a better environment in which everyone does business, not to punish alleged malefactors. Other people get paid for that, so it's not my priority, and if I get to it at all, it will be in my own time. I am personally aware of many companies that Cannot Be Dealt With On A Reasonable Basis, but I am not legally charged with punishing their misdeeds, and must be careful in what I publish about them, lest someone punish me for my misdeeds.