By Simone Malcolm

Three Queens homeowners today sued JP Morgan Chase for allegedly fraudulently delaying and denying their applications to escape foreclosure under the Obama Administration’s home modification plan.

The lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court accuses the bank of breach of contract by violating the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) requirements by not providing timely or sufficient information to the homeowners.

HAMP provides eligible homeowners the opportunity to modify their mortgages to make them more affordable. Under the program, lenders are required to provide permanent modifications to all eligible homeowners who complete three months of trial payments and verify their income.

But the plaintiffs say that agents for JP Morgan Chase gave them wrong information that led to denial of the benefit.

“Chase has completely lacked any transparency and has been staggeringly unresponsive, leaving us in the lurch for months,” complained Queens Village homeowner Shanaz Begum. “Our son is headed to college in the fall. We don’t know how to afford those bills with the possibility of losing our home still looming.”

“In the case of all three of our homeowners, they met that requirement, they even went beyond it,” said Urban Justice Center attorney Carmela Huang.

Lawyers said that Begum and another homeowner, Alex Lam, have been making payments for nine months and Tamara Williams has been making payments for four months; still, the bank won’t modify their mortgages.

When Lam applied to get his mortgage rate decreased he says he was told that he did not qualify because he was current with his payments. He charges that the bank advised him to deliberately miss mortgage payments to become eligible

But then the bank turned around and started foreclosure proceedings because of the two missed payments, the lawsuit charges.

“I may lose my home and my credit is damaged because I believed what the bank told me,” said Lam.

A bank spokesman, without promising anything, offered a glimmer of hope to the homeowners.

“We are happy to talk to the borrowers, review their situations and see if we can help,” he said in an e-mail to NyCityWatch. “We follow the program parameters to determine who qualifies.”