Verico The Mortgage Station
Email to Mr. W. Mark Squire, Chief Operating Officer and President at Verico Financial Group Inc
On June 24, 2022, I sent a message to Mr. W. Mark Squire, Chief Operating Officer and President at Verico Financial Group Inc, via LinkedIn and then via email through the primary contact page at the website for the Verico Financial Group. In that message, which was confirmed to be receieved, I explained what had happened at Verico The Mortgage Station, including the criminal act of usury, also known as loansharking. So far, ten days later, we have received no reply.
For those not familiar with this story:
I am a journalist with 20+ years of experience in media, both in Canada and abroad. I am also the CEO of the Ontario Community Awareness Network, a benevolent not-for-profit that operates a community media channel called Five Points Media. Our purpose is to help charities and compassionate community groups through donated services.
I made the mistake of engaging the services of Verico The Mortgage Station in Lefroy to finance renovations of our new community studio. The broker, Lisa Purchase, took three times as long as was promised to close the mortgage, and she also disregarded, often with short notice, multiple dates by which she promised to have everything done.
Verico The Mortgage Station - Email to Mr. W. Mark Squire, Chief Operating Officer and President at Verico Financial Group Inc
On at least one occasion, Lisa Purchase used a delay to steer me toward a private mortgage at roughly twice the interest rate of the initial offer, which I declined. The brokers were also, in my opinion, cavalier about how their apparent negligence or incompetence was costing our benevolent community service tens of thousands of dollars.
Worst yet, I discovered that the broker I thought I could trust had arranged for a personal loan through another broker at usury levels of interest, also known as loansharking. The rate of interest was set at an illegal 10% per month or 120% per year, twice the legal limit. This crime can be an indictable offence and can carry a punishment of imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.
All of this and more is what I experienced after making the very expensive and harmful mistake of entrusting the brokers and management at Verico The Mortgage Station, located at 1370 Killarney Beach Rd. in Lefroy.
This ongoing story is presented in segments to enhance your access to the details:
- Email sent to Mr. W. Mark Squire Chief Operating Officer and President at Verico Financial Group Inc - Pending
- South Simcoe Police Reviewing Evidence of Loansharking - June 29, 2022
- Stonewalling and Silence - June 18, 2022
- Loansharking in Lefroy? - June 18, 2022
- Incompetence or Negligence? - June 18, 2022
Verico The Mortgage Station - Email to Mr. W. Mark Squire, Chief Operating Officer and President at Verico Financial Group Inc
My message to Mr. Squire was simple and to the point:
Article about crime of Usuary at Verico The Mortgage Station
Mr. Squire
I am a journalist based in Barrie working on a series of articles and a video documentary about at least one claim of loansharking and potentially other criminal offences committed at Verico The Mortgage Station in Lefroy. We are also addressing the evident incompetence or negligence by the team of brokers there who dragged a three-week mortgage process into a nine-week nightmare that resulted in costing my video production business and our benevolent not-for-profit media company as much as $25,000.00 in lost income. Our ongoing article can be found at HTTPS://www.fivepointsmedia.ca/verico-the-mortgage-station-a-nine-week-nightmare.html
The story is attracting a lot of attention as it spreads through various posts on social media. Some of that focus has been from various mainstream media companies, and more will be generated by our pending press releases.
I believe the reason for this could be that nobody from Verico The Mortgage Station has stepped up to “correct” us regarding our reporting, which is fully backed by hundreds of pages of evidence. Most people will of course come to their own conclusions as to why the management and brokers at Verico The Mortgage Station are not willing, or perhaps not able, to defend their actions against the evidence provided. Most people will say that only the guilty hide.
My best estimate is that several tens of thousands of people have already found our article, and that this pattern will only increase exponentially. During the past few days, Google and the other search engines have filtered our content and our article is starting to show up prominently in related enquiries. We have also seen that it has been posted on various financial related groups to which we do not have posting privileges, leaving me to conclude that other brokers or perhaps those working as lenders have shared it.
Yesterday I spoke with an officer of the South Simcoe Police seeking the charge of usury against two of your brokers. Today I forwarded to him 200 plus pages of emails that were sent back and forth during the nine weeks it took the brokers to negotiate a simple equity-based mortgage with a CHIP mortgage provider. He requested this evidence so he could forward the file to the Criminal Investigations Division. Next week I will be sending a comprehensive file to the Financial Service Regulatory Authority. It is also my intent to file civil litigation to both attain details not currently available to me, and to recover our losses caused by the apparent negligence or incompetence of the brokers at Verico The Mortgage Station.
It is not my desire to hurt your company, as from what I have read, the apparent criminal activity and the avoidance of professional accountability demonstrated so far by the management and brokers at Verico The Mortgage Station may not be indicative of your entire franchise based chain. As such, I want to give your company the chance to speak out about the crime of usuary and to explain why this simple equity based transaction ended up taking so long, if not for incompetence or negligence.
Can we arrange a time for an on-camera interview?
While the guilty hide in shadow, people of good conscience will raise the light to reveal the truth.
My name is printed clearly on the bottom of every page of this article.
Verico The Mortgage Station asserts sales of $5 million a year, so if what we are reporting here is not 100% accurate and fully backed with evidence, they would have retained legal counsel to seek an injunction, or to threaten to sue us for defamation, or to take some form of quasi-legal action to protect the reputation of their business. However, they have not done so, and have in fact done nothing to even try to legitimize their actions that were in truth criminal. Now the South Simcoe Police are reviewing the hundreds of pages of emails and other documents that show the truth about how the brokers of Verico The Mortgage Station committed the crime of usury, or loansharking, by charging a level of interest at an annual rate of 120%, which is twice the legally permitted limit.
Apparently, the brokers and management of Verico The Mortgage Station believe they can simply ignore the crime they committed and the apparent negligence or incompetence that caused a benevolent not-for-profit to lose thousands of dollars. However, if that is true, they have not considered search engines and the interest that is already being shown in this article by some of Canada's larger mainstream media outlets. Today, most news stories are being broken by small independent media sources.
Other Facts:
This article is a personal story about what happened to me when I made the mistake of refinancing the studio and production facilities of our benevolent not-for-profit community channel through Verico The Mortgage Station. I cannot claim to be neutral in my reporting, but all claims made in this article are backed by multiple pieces of emperical evidence. I am relying on the emails and other evidence to support my claims.
David Flude, the Principal Broker at Verico The Mortgage Station, was asked by me to contribute to this article before we released it. He chose instead to hide from his apparent negligence and the crimes of his brokers. On Friday, June 26, 2022, I sent a message to Mr. W. Mark Squire, Chief Operating Officer and President at Verico Financial Group Inc. via LinkedIn and the website at www.verico.ca. Again, we have received no reply. There is no logical reason that these professionals would evade our allegations unless they know them to be true.
Investigative Journalism by John Ironside, Producer/Publisher, Five Points Media
A division of the Ontario Community Awareness Network, a provincially registered not-for-profit community media service
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