Hacker group releases BofA employee correspondence

Customers use ATM machines inside of a Bank of America branch in Times Square in New York March 8, 2011.

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (Reuters) - Anonymous, a hacker group sympathetic to WikiLeaks, released on Monday emails that it obtained from someone who said he is a former Bank of America Corp employee.

In the emails dating from November 2010, people that appear to be employees of a Balboa Insurance, a Bank of America insurance unit, discuss removing documents from loan files for a group of insured properties.

Neither the emails nor correspondence released by Anonymous indicate the reason behind the electronic record keeping discussion.

A representative of Anonymous told Reuters on Sunday the documents relate to the issue of whether Bank of America has improperly foreclosed on homes. The representative added that he had not seen the documents, but he has been briefed on their contents.

Consumer groups have accused major U.S. lenders of foreclosing on many homes without having proper documentation in place.

A BofA spokesman said on Sunday the documents were clerical and administrative documents stolen by a former Balboa Insurance employee, and were not related to foreclosures.

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

The group's email release also includes correspondence between Anonymous and the former employee, in which the former employee described the bank as a "cult" and said the company is now intent on destroying his career.

"I'm well known throughout Bank of America," the former employee said in one email. "They saw to that when they showed everyone my picture and labeled me as a terrorist."

The documents are available at bankofamericasuck.com/, a website that was working intermittently early on Monday morning.

(Reporting by Joe Rauch; Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington, D.C.; Editing by Jon Loades-Carter)