Wells Fargo Bank Mistakenly Forecloses A Retired Couple's Home

A retired couple's nightmare materialized when Wells Fargo Bank's contractors broke into their home in Twentynine Palms, California, changed the locks, and emptied the house — and then, in an almost unbelievable twist, came back and did it again.

Here is what actually happened, as reported by ABC News in September 2012. The bank had a legitimate foreclosure on a nearby property. But its contractors were sent to the wrong address — a case of a wrong house identified from an internet photo with mismatched GPS coordinates, of all things. The retired couple's home, which had no mortgage connection to Wells Fargo at all, was the one that got "secured."

The couple was away when the first cleanout happened. They returned to find their locks changed and their belongings — decades of a life's accumulation, including irreplaceable photos and family items — gone, discarded by contractors who treated the contents as abandoned foreclosure debris. Then, after the error was supposedly understood, the contractors made the same mistake a second time, using the same wrong information.

The couple spent months in a legal and bureaucratic maze trying to get the bank to acknowledge the error and make them whole. The case was not unique: during the foreclosure crisis, overwhelmed mortgage servicers and their armies of contractors made systematic errors — "robo-signing" mass foreclosure documents without review, breaking into the wrong homes, discarding people's lives as debris. Most of the victims were borrowers in genuine default. The ones that stung worst were people like this couple, who had done nothing at all.

There is a temptation to call it a bank error. It was, but that undersells it: the mistake was repeated twice, by two different contractors, using information the bank had already been told was wrong. Systems, not typos, are what break into the wrong house twice.