Let’s not forget that this looming settlement will also conclude the foreclosure reviews that were supposed to provide regulators with chapter and verse on how banks abused their customers. Stopping the reviews before they are finished means that the banks will be allowed to claim that abuses were rare and that $10 billion is an adequate penalty.

A spokesman at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency declined to comment on whether a settlement was imminent or what it might look like. But with no clear details about its terms, many questions remain. First, of course, is how many borrowers will receive the $3.75 billion, and how will that money be shared? And who will ensure that the funds go to the right people? The fact is, most people will not be hiring a lawyer to pursue their cases further against servicers, so this money is all that they will receive.

Another problem is that the money will be doled out to wronged borrowers based on work done by consultants hired by the banks responsible for the improprieties. How can their findings be trusted? What’s more, the reviews’ conclusions about harm are based on the servicers’ side of the story, not homeowners’.

Because the consultants work for the banks, it is also possible that these institutions may use the information gleaned from the foreclosure reviews to profit once again on troubled borrowers. If foreclosed borrowers left a property while owing the difference between the amount of the loan and what the bank received in a sale of the home, the bank may not have known the borrowers’ whereabouts until that information was reported in a request for review.

Finally, what if victims of an improper foreclosure didn’t receive a review because they didn’t know about the program? Letters about the program sent to 5.3 percent of targeted borrowers were returned as undeliverable, regulators said.

And many of those who did receive the mailings may not have understood them. In a study last June, the Government Accountability Office concluded that the initial letter, the request-for-review form and foreclosure review Web site were “written above the average reading level of the U.S. population.” What’s more, the study said, the materials did not include specifics about what borrowers might receive as a remedy, possibly affecting their motivation to respond.

In any case, as of Dec. 6, 2012, only 322,771 borrowers had requested an independent review, according to the Fed. That’s 7.3 percent of the affected borrowers during the period, a figure that does not mirror the widespread problems regulators said they had identified in the foreclosure system.