The "hacktivist" group Anonymous has published its first batch of internal emails which it claims demonstrate mortgage fraud at Bank of America. The cache of emails includes correspondence between employees at Balboa Insurance, a subsidiary of Bank of America.

The source of the leaked documents is a former Balboa employee, according to the hacker group. Late last night, Anonymous published its correspondence with the employee who said he wants to expose Bank of America's abusive foreclosure practices. In the correspondence, the employee describes Bank of America as a "cult" and makes vague complaints about management's obsession with worker dress code.

Currently, the site hosting the leaked documents appears to be suffering from a distributed denial-of-service attack. However some news agencies have been able to access some of the documents. The BBC has uncovered a document that "appears to show an employee of Balboa Insurance asking a colleague to delete certain loan identifying numbers from their computer system." The report doesn't give any other specifics on the document.

Business Insider has dismissed the source as a "whiney former employee" and says the deletion of identifying numbers on loans may have been completely benign.

However, there are more files that the hacker group is attempting to share that are currently unavailable due to DDoS attacks.

As it stands Bank of America is outwardly confident that none of the documents show impropriety. Over the weekend, a Bank of America spokesperson confirmed that a former Balboa insurance employee had stolen company documents. However, he said they were harmless clerical and administrative documents.

"We are confident that his extravagant assertions are untrue," the spokesman said.

We'lll keep you updated when more documents can be viewed.

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at jhudson at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.
John Hudson