Brian Kennedy was surprised when he logged onto the Wells Fargo website to pay his mortgage and discovered he had a checking account he never asked for.

And it had a negative balance of $60 for two months of fees and penalties.

Kennedy went to his local Wells Fargo branch to complain, and the account was promptly closed. But the bank charged him a $1 fee for the privilege. He reached into his pocket and handed the bank officer a dollar bill to close the account he never wanted.

“It really pissed me off,” said Kennedy, a retiree in Westminster, Maryland. “They expect people to not be paying attention and hope you don’t notice. I’ve got a high credit score and I want to keep it that way. As soon as rates drop enough I’m going to refinance out of their mortgage.”

Wells Fargo (WFC) has agreed to

Charlotte Observer:

Julie Miller was working in Pennsylvania for Wachovia when Wells Fargo took over the Charlotte bank in 2008 and began changing more than the name on its branches.

Miller said she watched with dismay as Wells Fargo increased her branch’s sales goals and lowered bonuses for meeting the new targets. The changes took place around 2011, when her branch converted to the Wells Fargo name, she said.

“It became a living nightmare,” said Miller, 52, who no longer works for Wells Fargo. “They almost doubled our goals and decreased our incentive pay. It drove me to drink.”

Miller said her health began deteriorating as she tried to meet daily requirements that her branch sell 42 products, like mortgages and lines of credit, and open seven checking accounts.

That’s when she also started noticing Wells Fargo customers complaining they were being signed up for products they never asked for.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) approved rues on August 5, 2016, to help prevent wrongful home foreclosures.

Mortgage servicers will be required to promptly notify borrowers when loss mitigation applications are complete.  Many mortgage servicers never considered an application complete and repeatedly demanded information and documents that the borrower had already provided.  Many borrowers complained that the servicers often demanded federal income tax returns over and over.  Borrowers were required to make adjusted monthly payments while the applications were pending.  The repeated stalling benefited the banks and servicers.  Many borrowers reported that when their applications were finally refused, the interim payments were never credited to their accounts.  Servicers are also prohibited from dual tracking – pursuing both a modification and a foreclosure simultaneously.

… [Read More]

DeGiacomo v. First Call Mortgage Company (In re Reznikov), 548 B.R. 606 (Bankr. D. Mass. 2016) –

A chapter 7 trustee sought to avoid a recorded mortgage based on a defective acknowledgment and then to preserve the lien of the mortgage for the benefit of the bankruptcy estate. The mortgagee objected – arguing that the acknowledgment was sufficient, and the debtor objected – claiming a homestead exemption in the property.