Chris Arnold
speaker
152 appearances
10 recordings
4 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 4 Apr
Chris Arnold’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 3.
Appearances
Right. Which all seem great, except that homeowners are now getting calls from debt collectors who say, you know what? That loan didn't die. You owe me the money. Sometimes it's twice what people borrowed in the first place and they're demanding payment on these old loans.
Yeah, thousands of people. And we did an episode back in May about a woman named Karen McDonough. She's a nurse who lives in Quincy, Massachusetts. And in the episode, we told how one morning she looked out her window and she was just shocked to see this group of men gathering on her lawn. And there was one guy who was like in charge with a clipboard.
So he told Karen that her home was being foreclosed on and auctioned off. And this is the house that Karen had owned for 17 years. She'd raised her kids in this house and she'd been making payments on it. So this was, of course, like really upsetting for Karen.
Well, one thing is that government officials have also been looking at this issue. And after a story came out, I interviewed the attorney general in Massachusetts, Andrea Campbell, and it was pretty cool. She actually knew about our episode.
And her office has started to take some action. It turns out the AGs there have been investigating one of these companies that's been foreclosing on people's homes. The company's named Franklin Credit Management. The AG alleges it was breaking state and federal law by trying to collect on these debts.
The company did not admit wrongdoing, we should say, but to avoid the risk of litigation, it struck a settlement with the AG.
And what she's talking about with the $10 million there is that the company basically agreed to forgive all of the mortgages it controls for people in the state of Massachusetts. And that's more than 500 loans.
Yeah, I mean, for sure. This settlement involved just one company and what they're doing in just one state. So Karen McDonough, the settlement doesn't help her. She's still trying to get ownership of her home back from a different company that foreclosed on it. But consumer law groups are hoping that there will be more to come with the government cracking down.
And so is the Massachusetts AG, Andrea Campbell.
And Alexi, I can tell you that NPR's investigations unit is also paying attention and we're talking to more homeowners and finding more companies that are doing this. So stay tuned. All right. We definitely will.
Absolutely. Glad to do it.
Hey, it's Kenny Malone. for an NPR Politics podcast episode dropping a few hours after that kind of thing. And then finally, there is Consider This. That is the podcast where NPR covers one big story in depth every weekday evening. So up first in the morning, Consider This in the evening, and the NPR Politics podcast anytime big stuff happens.
It's an around-the-clock election news survival kit from NPR podcasts. Okay, thank you for listening. Here's the show.
Picture a Jeep bouncing along a dirt road in rural Oklahoma.
These are two of my colleagues, NPR reporters Quill Lawrence and Chris Arnold, and they're pulling up to a house.
Kind of the house, really, that's been at the center of this astonishing and, frankly, pretty bizarre problem that has been unfolding over the last couple years. They get out of the car, microphones recording, of course. How are you doing?
They're greeted by the homeowners, Ray and Becky Queen. Ray served in the army in Iraq.
When Chris first met Ray and Becky Queen, they were about to lose their house because somewhere in some governmental office, a decision was made about how to help veterans keep their homes during COVID, and it had gone catastrophically wrong.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone. Today on the show, we ride along with our colleagues at NPR as they uncover a single change to some wonky mortgage terms that not many people were paying attention to. The result of that change, tens of thousands of veterans were about to lose their homes because of a policy meant to help keep them in those homes.
Let's make sure everyone is rolling.
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