Straight from the headlines of the past few years concerning the housing bubble in subprime mort-gages and the resultant burst and housing disaster, comes the federal appellate case from California of Balderas v. Countrywide Bank, N.A., 664 F.3d 787 (9th Cir. 2011). There the mortgagors withstood a Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) motion by the defendants and were allowed to go forward with a claim under the Truth in Lending Act. The facts in that case are relatively straightforward. The Balder-ases, Victor and Belen, are immigrants with no fa-cility in reading English. They were contacted in September 2006 by a mortgage broker, Mor Cazakov, without their solicitation. Mr. Cazakov said that he could refinance their home, switch them to a fixed rate mortgage, and in addition let them cash out $50,000 under the transaction. All of this was to oc-cur without their incurring any penalties.
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