When Katherine Dudtschak was hired as President and CEO of HomeEquity Bank, replacing the retiring Steven Ranson, a twenty-seven-year veteran of those positions, she did so with a flare and style of her own, and the promise that the bank that caters to seniors might just have a reboot of ethics coming its way.

However, what seems to have happened is capitulation, as she has lined up with the fellas to continue covering for brokers who defraud seniors.

About a month ago we wrote to Ms. Dudtschak seeking to interview her regarding the actions of the HomeEquity Bank, where she sits in the highest chair and is accountable for the dealings of the institution. The buck should stop with her.

She ignored that email, and apparently chose instead to join the ranks of those at HomeEquity Bank who protect loan sharks that defraud seniors.

Sadly, her lofty position means she has also inherited our expose documentary about banking fraud in Canada, which focuses heavily on the HomeEquity Bank, which protected the brokers at Verico the Mortgage Station who committed fraud by usury, or loan sharking, which they have never challenged or contested in court.

We wrote to Ms. Dudtschak again, copying every lender known to work with the loan shark brokers, advising the board member of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights that we are filing a Human Rights complaint of 'Elder Abuse and Neglect' based on the fraud and cover-up, while seeking an investigation by the RCMP.

Good afternoon, Ms. Dudtschak:

I am writing to follow up on my letter of June 10, 2024, a full month ago, which was apparently ignored by you as President and incoming CEO of HomeEquity Bank. You did not respond, and you did not even show the courtesy to pass my concerns down to an underling for reply. The content of that letter has also been online at https://themortgagestation.tv/letter-to-katherine-dudtschak-homeequity-bank.html for more than thirty days, making it doubtful you have not seen it. As I am a client of HomeEquity Bank, and our dealings are currently very public, what does that reveal to your clients or those who might be thinking of signing up for a CHIP Reverse Mortgage?

I must question why hiding is the go-to response for the multi-billion-dollar HomeEquity Bank, just as it is for the corporations you choose to work with, like the loan sharks at Verico the Mortgage Station who defraud seniors and veterans, and through their actions defunded a self-funded, not-for-profit, community media service that supports all local charities, not-for-profits, and benevolent groups in our community. By choosing to ignore your responsibility in this matter, as the highest authority of the largest component, you are self-implicating as a party to the abuses.

I draw to your attention the content of your own 'Resolving Complaints' page located at https://www.homeequitybank.ca/complaints/:

If you have a complaint of any kind, we are committed to resolving it promptly and effectively. We encourage you to follow the process outlined below, to help you get your complaint resolved as soon as possible.

Once we receive your complaint, we will acknowledge receipt and work towards resolving your issue in a timely manner. We will contact you, typically within 7 days, to follow-up accordingly.

We will investigate your complaint and endeavor to provide you with an impartial, objective, and fair resolution to your complaint within 56 days of receipt.

You can obtain, upon request, at any time during the complaint process, an up-to-date status of your complaint.

You have the right to submit your complaint to the Ombudsman's for Banking and Investment Survives (OBSI), whose contact details are outlined in this brochure, if:

• We are unable to resolve your complaint within the prescribed 56-day period for dealing with complaints

• You are not satisfied with the resolution offered by the Bank's Senior Designated Complaints Officer

I understand that the facts of this story may seem fluid to you, at least when told by the wrongly entrusted 'financial professionals' who are working to protect their own best interests, but I can assure you that NONE of these steps were undertaken more than two years ago when I notified HomeEquity Bank that I had been defrauded by usury or loan sharking at Verico the Mortgage Station when signing up for the CHIP Reverse Mortgage. Of course, after more than 754 days of uncontested active online reporting, nobody can claim ignorance. Except for one condescending phone call by an associate at your corporation, NOBODY has addressed my concerns or investigated my fully supported allegations of a serious indictable offence that brings with it, upon conviction, a prison sentence of up to five years.

Your corporation has also never contested my very public allegations. That is also true of the owners and directors of Verico the Mortgage Station and Verico Financial Group Inc. Apparently, birds of a feather do truly defraud seniors together. So, what possible, viable reason could HomeEquity Bank have to not speak with me, nor to investigate fully supported allegations, the validity of which your management team has never denied?

You have an army of lawyers and more money than most anybody can imagine, yet your 'financial professionals' clearly fear what I can bring to the table. That is why they will not take legal action to seek relief by professing their innocence in a court of law. Their trepidation also extends to facing the truth of our evidence while being recorded on camera. That may have been quasi understandable a couple of years ago, when the allegations were fresh and nobody knew who we are, but neither is now the case. You know we are altruists and I have no doubt you have viewed the testimonials on our various websites. You have no reason to feel intimidated by us so why the evasion? When discussing covering up for crimes like loan sharking and fraud, that decision to hide becomes criminal activity on its own under the Criminal Code of Canada. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-341.html

When I read your personal story and learned the persona of the person who you project yourself to be, I thought you would have sufficient integrity and strength of character to recognise the injustice undertaken and perpetuated for two full years by the 'financial professionals' of Verico the Mortgage Station, Verico Financial Group Inc., and the HomeEquity Bank. I felt this was especially likely given your role on the board of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, since the Human Rights Commission recognises the harm afflicted by 'Elder Abuse & Neglect'. As noted on their website, Health Canada has defined this form of abuse as "the physical, psychosocial or financial mistreatment of a senior". https://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/time-action-advancing-human-rights-older-ontarians/elder-abuse-neglect. The act does not say that 'financial mistreatment' must be committed by family members or other close contacts, and the definition is clearly open to the actions of an entrusted bank or other financial institution.

The reason I am discussing the Human Rights aspect of this story is that it seems we and the story are now going in that direction. Yesterday, I was reporting on the LCBO strike in Barrie, and I spoke at length with some visiting elected senior members from OPSEU/SEFPO. They had heard of our story, which came as no surprise when considering our background of working with various unions and our plans to picket the various offices of all three involved corporations, and the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario (FSRA). Amongst the issues raised, the President of one of the local chapters asked why, given the evidence at my disposal, I had not filed a Human Rights complaint against Verico the Mortgage Station, Verico Financial Group Inc., and HomeEquity Bank.

We also discussed how the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP), valued at C$254B, which owns HomeEquity Bank, is governed by a board of directors that is appointed 50/50 by the Ontario Teachers' Federation (OTF) and the Ontario government. Most people accept that the current leadership of our province is corrupt and abusive of their power. People remember the Green Belt diabolical and are angered by the closures of Ontario Place and the Science Centre. The unions also very clearly remember Doug Ford's abuse of the notwithstanding clause against education support staff. The Conservatives may be able to influence investigations at agencies under their provincial control, as seems to have been the case, but not on a federal level, where the Human Rights Commission resides.

I fully acknowledge that the crime of loan sharking is not sufficient to warrant a complaint to the Human Rights Commission. However, since that offence was committed, both Verico Financial Group Inc. and HomeEquity Bank have gone to great lengths to cover up the crimes, mostly through the crime of 'fraudulent concealment'. We will also address the very suspicious police investigation that involved avoiding the case, only speaking with the accused and not the victim, and then omitting evidence and falsifying figures to provide a free pass to the multi-million-dollar brokers, who are allied to a multi-billion-dollar bank, that is owned by the quarter of a trillion dollar Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP), that is being protested against by its own members for investing in Lockheed Martin, which sells weapons to Israel that are being used to murder innocent women and children in Palestine. From what I can see, the forces against ethical reform within HomeEquity Bank, if that was ever your intent, are strong enough to circumvent any attempt by you or anybody else to suggest a course of action that would result in the ethical treatment of your clients, with the result being that you are in fact being indoctrinated as 'just one of the boys'.

David Flude and his brokers stole from me, and they almost caused the closure of our benevolent community channel. Then, your corporation and Verico Financial Group Inc. chose to ignore the crime and continue business as usual. The cost to us in maintaining the warning to others is less than 25c a day for hosting on our shared account, and the written content takes about twenty minutes a day to compose. We have also established multiple social media accounts, as was noted recently on https://www.facebook.com/MortgageFraudCanada/ that we will be utilizing in the coming weeks through new software. Be assured, our factual content will be online for many years, and even if I only update it once or twice a week, the truth will be released to the public, as is the job of the media.

It is due solely to the collective corporate decision to hide from responsibility that this story has grown from one of a small brokerage that defrauded a client to a much larger story of abuse of authority, manipulation of government and other official services, and a collective policy to evade and conceal criminal offences. The truth is not going anywhere and will only continue to grow larger every day. Now that we are enjoying phenomenal search engine optimization, and we have finished a large corporate contract that was eating our time, we will be focusing so much more on video content, which we will be releasing on a national level by boosting and sharing to pages focused on issues like Human Rights, the labour movement, scams, banks, and the mortgage industry. While playing your role for public exposure, you may talk the talk. However, 24/7 my team and I walk the walk and we bring home receipts.

I would have thought that this kind of cesspool of corruption would be repugnant to somebody with your apparent character, unless of course your public persona is a façade, which certainly appears now to be the case. How will it look when a member of the board at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights finds herself having to explain collusion and avoidance to the Human Rights Commission and defending against fully supported allegations and evidence. We will also include the actions of the South Simcoe Police Service who supposedly investigated this case of usury by omitting evidence and falsifying figures. We will be requesting an investigation by the RCMP, based on the issue of Human Rights. Let's see what the Human Rights Commission and the RCMP think about the blatantly obvious abuses of public trust and the ongoing game of hide and seek.

We are currently working on a series of short videos that are intended to draw more traffic to our website, especially from other media. They will be used on social media and boosted in various high population regions across our country. We are also now producing another video, of greater detail and content, about how HomeEquity Bank is an asset of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (OTPP), and how the investments of the much larger corporation are connected to the genocide in Palestine. As always, we welcome feedback from you and your board of directors.

I truly do not see David Flude running into a burning car to rescue your baby, or doing much of anything to help you, so I am flummoxed as to why your multi-billion-dollar corporation has sunk in and hunkered down to protect loan sharks who defrauded the clients of your once respected financial institution. It is also confusing why you would not only allow but invite the criminals to pull HomeEquity Bank into this very public expose documentary about loan sharking in the mortgage industry, fraud, abuse of trust, concealment of an indictable offence, and self-incrimination. You can be assured that if in 1982, Tylenol had discovered that the poison found in their product that killed seven people had come from a component supplier, that contract would have ended in seconds.

In closing, I am once again offering to meet with you for an interview, at which point you can present any evidence that counters our allegations, and as I noted in my email of September 5, 2023, found here, "If you can debunk our allegations on camera, using tangible evidence, we will cancel the production. We cannot be fairer than that. If the brokers of Verico the Mortgage Station won't do that, their inaction should speak volumes to the third-party corporations that have lined up like lemmings to support their criminal activities on nothing more than blind faith."

Sincerely,
John Ironside
Producer, Five Points Media