They later confirmed that not only had Yu taken payments he shouldn’t have, but the loan application included inaccurate information about the couple’s income. She and her sister, Abacus president Jill Sung, confronted Yu, asking “What are these checks?” and then called off the close. This confounded Vera, who’d never heard of these checks and immediately suspected that the employee, a man named Ken Yu, may have been up to something. At some point, the husband said that he wanted to make sure that $2,500 in checks the couple had written previously would be put toward the closing costs. The Abacus loan officer who’d worked with the couple on the mortgage was not present, but the bank’s director Vera Sung - a daughter of the company’s founder Thomas Sung - was there. A young couple, both immigrants, had come to the bank to close on the purchase of a two-family house in Brooklyn. “What Are These Checks?”Ībacus inadvertently pushed itself into the D.A.’s crosshairs in Dec.

Cyrus Vance announced a multitude of charges against the bank and 19 current and former employees, alleging that Abacus had sold “hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fraudulent loans to the Federal National Mortgage Association” (Fannie Mae), he intimated that Abacus had been involved in the same sort of underhanded schemes that bigger lenders used to paint a pretty face on shoddy loans in order to make a quick buck by reselling them before they went toxic.īut as those who followed the story would find out over the three years that followed, while there were unethical employees and questionable loan documents being filed at Abacus, there was no apparent effort to defraud Fannie Mae.

Tonight’s episode of PBS’ Frontline is “Abacus: Small Enough To Jail,” from documentarian Steve James ( Hoop Dreams), providing a behind-the-scenes look at the years-long legal battle between the Chinatown bank and prosecutors who targeted Abacus while leaving Wall Street intact. You might think the Manhattan district attorney had his choice of banks to prosecute for these obvious and far-reaching crimes, but in the end only one bank has been indicted on felony fraud charges related to the 2008 collapse: Abacus. It’s more than a mile away - and a world apart - from the more famous banks on Wall Street whose reckless behaviors during the housing bubble led to trillions of dollars in economic loss, the failure of financial institutions nationwide, an unprecedented federal bailout of the banking and auto industries, and continued fraud by big banks in a rush to foreclose on large numbers of homes as quickly as possible. in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown, you’ve probably passed by the modest headquarters of Abacus Federal Savings, a family run community bank that has served New York City’s Chinese immigrant population for more than three decades.

9.12.17 9:00 AM EDT By Chris Morran enough to jail too big to fail frontline banks crime news mortgage fraud nyc

Abacus federal savings bank jill sung