Have you ever thought about how many Order Mills in our Industry are using email addresses ending in Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, or otherwise? Fact of the matter is that if you are performing services for an order mill uncapable of paying the $6 a month for branded email — email requiring a domain name — then chances are your personally identifiable information (PII) is next up to bat for being hacked. Fact of the matter is that the most dangerous risk to PII — not just Labor’s information, but homeowners, as well — are the fly-by-night Order Mills popping up everywhere. Make no mistake that the lack of information security lies squarely at the feet of the Prime Vendors. Any basic reading of the Master Services Agreement (MSA) between Prime Vendors and their Clients — Financial institutions, private label investors, GSE’s, and the US government — will note the very specific clauses pertaining to this. In fact, it is Liability 101. With the latest ego fueled purchases of multiple Industry firms, in order to consolidate brand and profit, many of those firm’s subsidiaries were fly-by-night Order Mills.
Order Mills are the catch all of bugs, viruses, and breaches. In fact, most Order Mills operate on a laptop and a Gmail account. Vendor Managers pressed to make their bonus pay and keep the stats up gladly exempt them from any type of meaningful scrutiny. It is a problem as when the actual CEO’s get their balls handed to them by Foreclosurepedia they whine that it isn’t fair because they didn’t know.
To better understand the problem, let’s take a look at the recent collapse of healthcare giant, UnitedHealth, as reported upon by Axios here and here. UnitedHealth had recently purchased Change Healthcare, through UnitedHealth’s Optum division, who handles “14 billion clinical, financial, and operational transactions annually,” according to its website. Here is how Axios puts it, which is quoted in larger than normal format in order to succinctly put the issue,
A central question that has emerged since a cyberattack on a UnitedHealth Group subsidiary is how the strike against a single company has wrought such chaos across an entire industry.
Why it matters: Hospitals, doctors’ offices and pharmacies are still struggling with the fallout of the outage of Change Healthcare’s payment system, as they worry emergency measures won’t be enough if the disruption drags on.
The big picture: Some cybersecurity experts point to UnitedHealth’s buying spree, which among other things has allowed the nation’s largest insurer to control a major piece of how medical claims are processed.
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- Horizontal and vertical mergers that have become common among major U.S. companies, including in health care, create massive targets for cyber criminals, said Jason Hogg, executive-in-residence at Great Hill Partners and a former FBI special agent.
- “From a cybersecurity perspective, you can affect everything from patient records and hospitals to the actual payment system,” Hogg said. “We have this massive exposure and it’s a national security threat.”
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You may simply replace UnitedHealthcare with Prime Vendors and Change Healthcare with Aspen Grove|ShieldHub, who controls PII on tens of millions of records on Labor, but not Management, or Verisk, with Verisk now controlling ALL property preservation software and bidding platforms on the preservation side of the Industry. It is a reality. The hacks of Safeguard Properties, National Field Network, and Mortgage Contracting Services, to simply name a few, and the breaches at Assurant Field Asset Services, Cemex, ServiceLink, and others underscores the problems — all of these cases are searchable on Foreclosurepedia.
With volumes so low today, the reality is that there is relatively no need for Order Mills. And as almost all Prime Vendors now have a front end dashboard for the handling of the work orders, those reasons for Order Mills almost drop to zero. And when every Order Mill’s staff we interviewed reported that there was no separation in between office work and personal work being conducted on the same computer, it further demonstrates the fact that Order Mills pose a clear and present danger to the Homeowner, Mortgagee, and Labor unless and until on site audits are implemented.
Industry leaders such as Ed Delgado and others have said, for years, that pass through regulations are needed in order to protect the three most important stakeholders: Homeowners, the Mortgagee, and Labor. It takes time, though. In fact, only after tens of millions of dollars in settlements for employee misclassification were levied that terms like Non Compete were removed from Prime Vendor MSA’s. Underscoring the problem, though, is the fact that many Order Mills continue using them. To that point, Foreclosurepedia is offering a FREE YEAR‘s subscription on Foreclosurepedia should you provide us with one.
In closing, some Members of Labor simply have a good rapport with their Order Mill and the vig they pay makes the $7 inspections worth it. Some folks using Order Mills are simply illegal aliens and need that buffer there as the Prime Vendors cannot legally hire them. For the vast majority of Labor, though, the reality has set in that driving over 50 miles, to an inspection and back, is not worth the $7 when McDonalds is paying $17.50 for the same amount of hourly pay. And when you add in fuel, insurance, cell phone service, and wait a month to get paid — which that payment may never come as we saw with Assero and Eduardo San Roman — it is easier to go direct to the Prime Vendor.
