OK Core, explain this one to we simpletons.
Alright, I'll start by giving a grammar lesson to you simpletons. The correct usage would be "explain this one to
us simpletons" since it is a direct object.
(see these loan pairs in notes file: 807138-833456)
I was all excited when I read your post, hoping you had stumbled upon yet another LendingClub conspiracy to defraud investors. In this case though, after reviewing those two loan IDs, it seems very innocent. And yeah it's definitely the same guy. 2 loans, 22 days apart. From what I've read here you can have up to two loans active at any given time.
Loan #1: Amount requested $24k, amount funded only $18.5k. So he walked away 5.5k short and accepted the loan anyway.
Loan #2: Amount requested $5.4k. (Gee, where have we seen that number?)
Loan #1 Q&A:
Q: What are your monthly expenses related to housing (rent, mortgage(s), home equity loan and / or line of credit, utilities, insurance, taxes, etc)
A: (07/12/2011-13:23) - monthly expenses 1887.00
Loan #2 Q&A:
Q: What are your current debt balances, interest rates, and monthly payments by type (credit cards, student loans, mortgages, lines of credit, etc)?
A: (08/10/2011-04:24) - mortgage 1495, loan 444, credit card 194, credit card 134
This adds up to 2267, for you simpletons
Difference in claimed monthly expenses between loan #1 and loan #2 was $380. Close enough to that new "loan $444" item. Especially taking into account reduced interest. And wouldn't you know it, loan #1's monthly payment was exactly $444.15/mo.
Conclusion: This guy was perfectly honest about everything and played by the rules. I don't see anything fun to dig up here. He didn't get the full amount the first time so it seems legit enough to go back to the well for the difference. He was up front about the new monthly expense.
2. There are 8 loans issued to this borrower all within 5 days of each other (472364,470562,470912,471412,471762,470024,472062,472214)
3. Those loans total $179,700
4. The borrower lists 1 Denver , 4 Boston, 2 NY, and one other Mass address (surely LC can tell they have multiple loan requests from the same borrower SS#)
5. The loan purposes are all different
6. Three of the loans show "Verified Income". Unfortunately they are all different!
Good find. This one is not so simple. Occam's razor may be of some help here. There are at least two possibilities:
1) Some guy took out 8 different loans under the same SSN within mere days. Using several different addresses, different incomes, and got all of his different incomes verified. No doubt he disguised his voice 8 different times during the phone interviews which LC
always did back then. And after getting away with all this, the guy paid them all back when he could have skipped town.
-- or --
2) LendingClub's programmers screwed up (again)
Which one requires the fewest number of absurd assumptions?
Couple of things I noticed while looking over some of the loans in question:
- Notice the revolving credit balance is $255. Or 0xFF, the maximum value of an unsigned byte. Seems suspicious to me. Unintentional byte shifting could cause this. Struct alignment issue. Or 255 would be a nice "round number" for a programmer to use if he was typing in bogus data.
- This "guy" owns a home with no mortgage payment but yet in at least 2 loans "he" lists "Home Buying" as the loan purpose. Doubtful.
- DTI is the same out to 2 decimal places even when income is different.
- "Member_xxx's Credit History (as reported by credit bureau on 1/1/06)
The credit report fetch date is way off here. Unless Stephanie's many powers include ESP, Lending Club is not going to pull a credit report 3 years before the guy even applies. Again, seems to be bogus data to me.
I don't know for sure what happened here, but I'm convinced that it's not the same person and something screwy happened with LC's data.
As usual. I did not go as far as to look at the payment histories for each loan though. There might be more clues there.
These could be test cases that found their way into the file. Or these could be some of those "fake" notes that LC issued to meet excess demand.