A class-action lawsuit alleges that Wells Fargo screwed up the same exact way almost 900 times, costing over 500 people their homes. As with most of Wells Fargo’s previous “errors” that caused widespread devastation, the horse-and-wagon bank has made an insufficient attempt to make good with its victims by pleading ignorance and throwing not nearly enough money at the problems it created.
Wells Fargo says an internal review found the bank denied help to hundreds of homeowners after fees charged by foreclosure attorneys were improperly used when the bank determined whom to offer mortgage help. The computer error began in 2010 and was not corrected until last April, the bank said.
Overall, 870 homeowners were denied help for which they qualified, including 545 who lost their homes to foreclosure. Wells Fargo says it has reached most of the customers affected and set aside $8 million to compensate them, though industry analysts say that number is likely to increase.
In the race to the bottom for Worst Major Bank In America, Wells Fargo has long been a frontrunner. The nation’s fourth largest bank, founded in 1852 by the same fellas who brought the world American Express, appears to be made of rubber and corruption (and a seemingly endless well of money set aside for punitive fines). How else can NRA-preferred Wells Fargo continue to bounce back after being caught in scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal?
Wells Fargo has, in the last decade or so, been found to have opened unauthorized secret accounts for customers that generated tons of overdraft fees; to have actively ripped off black, Spanish-speaking, and Navajo homeowners; to have overcharged for home appraisal fees; to have forced people into less-desirable retirement programs; to have actively ripped off pet owners and car owners alike with insurance scams; to have illegally repossessed the vehicles of military service members; and to have some serious-ass gender inequality that denies evil women within the company an equal opportunity to earn blood money with the same frequency as evil men.
But hey, they also made this superslick video featuring the Black Keys and horsies!
The newest scandal—an eight-year computer error that went unchecked as hundreds of people lost their homes—is a hard one to quantify. How, exactly, does an evil bank make good with someone like Michaela Christian, who bought her Las Vegas home in 1998, at age 24, only to lose it in 2013, after the economy crashed and she was devastated by a brutal car accident?
When the bank refused to modify her mortgage, Christian moved in with a friend and scrambled to rebuild her life.
Five years later, Wells Fargo admits it made a mistake. Christian, 46, qualified for the kind of mortgage help that may have saved her home after all.
Christian tells the Los Angeles Times that she first found out about the “error” when she received a letter from Wells Fargo in September, along with a $15,000 payoff.
"We want to make things right," the letter states. "We realize that our decision impacted you at a time you were facing a hardship."
Wells Fargo's letter didn't explain how it determined Christian was due only $15,000.
Christian estimates she had about $30,000 in equity in her then-home, on top of a $20,000 pool she’d installed. She narrowly escaped foreclosure by selling her house for $135,000 in 2013. Just five years later, the house is estimated to be worth a quarter of a million.
The pain of losing her home, however, goes far deeper than the financial.
"You can't put a price on what we lost. The scars will be there forever. I will never get over it," said Christian, now part of a class-action lawsuit against the bank. "I still miss my neighbors."
Tom Goyda, a spokesperson for Wells Fargo, declined to explain whether there’s a formula that determines the size of the checks they’re sending to the homeowners whose lives they destroyed. Clearly, there’s no price that can heal the damage done to Christian. And so far, despite billions in fines, there’s no punishment that seems likely to get Wells Fargo to do the right thing—and no glossy ad campaign should ever let us forget just exactly how dangerous greed can be.