In reviewing the comments to Fuller's JDB sale update on Prosper's blog, I noticed that christoofar215 posted:
I would like Prosper to separate the loans that only had 0 or 1 payments before they went into default and reserve those for legal action and investigation for ID theft/fraud, especially some of these that had AA/A/B credit.
It is one thing to fall into a debt hole and not be able to climb out of it; it’s another to take out a Prosper loan premeditated on the basis of intentionally not making a single payment on it.
The perennial Prosper ass-kisser replied:
@Christoofar215
According to the Prosper days video, loans like that are already screened for ID theft/fraud.
That got me to thinking. So I poked around on Lendingstats, and found that out of the 21,970 loans that have originated on Prosper, there are a grand total of 122 with status "repurchased." 66 of those are the NAT loans, leaving only 56 that have been truly "repurchased" (i.e., where Prosper paid lenders their principal back). 11 or 12 of these are the Victoria Crawford loans, leaving only 44 or 45 other repurchased loans. I'm pretty sure there were a handful of loans repurchased due to some sort of Prosper data problem a couple years ago, so there were about 40 loans altogether repurchased presumably under the ID-theft guarantee (beyond the Crawford scam).
Out of Prosper's 21,970 originated loans, 8,797 were originated after August 1, 2007 -- 40% of all of Prosper's originations. Yet Prosper has only repurchased ONE loan (originated November 13, 2007) originated in all of that time -- over nine months. Does anyone really believe that there has only been one case of identity theft in the last nine months? It seems far more likely that Prosper would rather bury its head in the sand, "see no evil," and hope to repurchase as few id-theft loans as possible. Undoubtedly, that is made much easier by their elimination of their real forums, since lenders there discovered many, if not most, of the id-theft loans that Prosper previously had to repurchase.
Does anyone know how to get a list of all repurchased loans by date of repurchase, rather than by origination date? It does not seem possible to do that on LS or Eric's, but I imagine it is possible elsewhere. Also, does anyone know how to obtain a list of all loans that made zero payments, and all those that made only 1 payment, and all those that made only 2 payments? That too does not appear to be possible on LS or Eric's, but should be possible from the data Prosper makes available.