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Longbridge Financial, one of the largest reverse mortgage lenders in the country, is currently embroiled in a lawsuit against competitor and Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) endorsement leader Mutual of Omaha Mortgage. Now Longbridge has filed a motion in court seeking to take down material it contends is deceptive and misleading from websites that it claims unfairly steer reverse mortgage business toward Mutual.
This is according to court filings reviewed by HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD). The robust filing clocks in at nearly 270 pages, and includes statements from an expert commissioned by Longbridge alongside a large number of visual exhibits.
The filing seeks an order to “remove advertisement and related content” from the website of Review Counsel, LLC, and to “refrain from publishing any further false, misleading, and deceptive advertisements, comparisons, reviews, and other content relating to reverse mortgage products on the Review Counsel website while this action remains pending,” the Longbridge filing said.
It highlights several web addresses at the Review Counsel website including a landing page that “spotlights” Mutual of Omaha, and multiple pages offering grades for several reverse mortgage companies. It is also seeking removal of pages from another website at issue from the original complaint, Advisory Institute, LLC, with similar demands.
In its own response to the initial complaint filed in court earlier this week, Mutual of Omaha has denied the allegations that it misled potential customers, and filed a counterclaim demanding a jury trial and for litigation to determine monetary losses inflicted upon it by Longbridge’s alleged advertising activities.
In its filing, Longbridge says that the websites at issue “falsely hold themselves out to the public as ‘independent’ third-party review platforms that offer ‘objective’ ratings and rankings of reverse mortgage providers, and aggressively advertise to ensure that they receive top placement within Google’s search results to lure senior citizens onto the fake review websites,” the company said in the filing.
Longbridge contends that instead, both sites exist “solely to promote Mutual” by giving it “artificially inflated scores” in comparison to other reverse mortgage companies. Longbridge claims that Mutual has “conceded these websites are fatally deceptive,” saying a series of changes to both websites at issue have been made since initially filing its complaint this past September.
“In the context of Mutual’s overall deceptive scheme, these changes are equivalent to rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic,” the filing said. “None of them will be permanent unless this court rules that Mutual cannot revert back to any of the admittedly false content it removed from Review Counsel and Advisory Institute, and none of them come close to addressing all of the false and misleading content that remains.”
Longbridge also contends that Mutual and the websites “aggressively drive consumer traffic to their deceptive websites through elevating their content on Google,” including screenshots in an effort to prove its claims. It also claims in the filing that the content on the sites has changed multiple times in January.
Longbridge added that it believes it is likely to prevail in court based on its claims, which it says warrant the requested injunction. The final determination, however, will be up to the presiding judge.
The company enlisted expert testimony from Utpal Dholakia, the George R. Brown Chair of Marketing at Rice University, to further reinforce its claims. Dholakia said he was being compensated for his time in providing his opinion.
Dholakia said that in his opinion, the websites at issue “are highly misleading to consumers,” adding the opinion that the ratings on the sites use “arbitrary and statistically unsound criteria.”
In its response filing, Mutual of Omaha stated that Review Counsel “rates financial services companies offering a broad spectrum of products based on objective criteria that Review Counsel has developed and periodically verifies,’” adding that “any compensation received by Review Counsel or Advisory Institute does not affect the ratings or scores of the companies listed on those websites.”
RMD reached out to legal representatives for both Longbridge Financial and Mutual of Omaha Mortgage, but did not receive an immediate response. The Longbridge filing said it will request the injunction formally in court on March 14.
A previous court filing indicated that both companies may be attempting to reach a settlement.
