in foreclosure problems
By MICHELLE CONLIN
Published: January 8, 2011
Christopher Marconi was in the shower when he heard a loud banging on his door.
By the time he grabbed a towel and hustled to his front step, a U.S. marshal’s sedan was peeling out of his driveway. Nailed to Marconi’s front door was a foreclosure summons from Wells Fargo, naming him as a defendant. But the notice was for a house Marconi had never seen — on a mortgage he never had.
Christopher Marconi stands outside his home in Garrison, N.Y. Marconi was in the shower when he heard a loud banging on his door. Nailed to his front door was a foreclosure summons from Wells Fargo, naming him as a defendant. AP PHOTO
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Homeowners are caught in foreclosure problems
Tom Williams was in his kitchen thumbing through the mail when he opened a letter from GMAC. It informed him that the bank would confiscate his house unless he immediately paid off his mortgage balance of $276,000.
But Williams had never missed a mortgage payment. And his loan wasn’t due to mature until 2032.
By now, you may have heard the stories of bank robo-signers powering through hundreds of foreclosure affidavits a day without verifying a single fact. But most of those involved homeowners who had stopped paying their mortgage. They were genuine defaulters. Now a new species of homeowner is getting pushed into foreclosure hell.
People have always loved to complain about their banks. The push-button circus that passes for customer service. The larding on of fees. But the false foreclosure cases are hardly the usual complaints. These homeowners paid their mortgages — or loan modifications — on time. Some even paid off their loans.
Many have to resort to paying a lawyer, even after presenting documentation. They say they have to sue not only to stop the wrongful foreclosure but also to attempt to win back their costs.
There are no official statistics for these homeowners, but lawyers, real estate agents and consumer advocates say their ranks are growing.
In November, during foreclosure hearings on Capitol Hill, senator after senator scolded the banks about wrongful foreclosures.
“This is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said Ira Rheingold, an attorney and executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.
Homeowners in Florida, Nevada, Texas and Pennsylvania have filed lawsuits alleging that they were victims of mistaken foreclosure. In many of those cases, the bank went so far as to haul away belongings and change the locks on the wrong homes.
One such suit was filed in March by Pennsylvania homeowner Angela Iannelli. She was up to date on her payments when, she said, she arrived home in October 2009 to find that Bank of America had ransacked her belongings, cut off her utilities, poured antifreeze down her drains, padlocked her doors and confiscated Luke, her pet parrot of 10 years. It took her six weeks to get the bank to clean up the house.
Iannelli’s lawyer said the parties are in the process of “mutually resolving the issues,” and the lawsuit is “in the process of being discontinued.” Bank of America did not immediately respond to a request for comment on her case.
In Kentucky and California, class-action lawsuits have been filed against major lenders on behalf of homeowners. “It is mind-boggling that these large banks accepted billions and billions of TARP money from the government, and they are just committing a fraud on the American people,” said Jack Gaitlin, who filed the Kentucky suit Oct. 4. He was referring to the 2008 government bailout of the banks, the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
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