The Connecticut Watchdog.com posted another doozy of a story on the total dysfunction of BofA. In an article ‘Bank Of America’s Christmas present: Foreclose Even Though Not A Payment Missed George Gombassy reported:
The largest bank in the United States earlier this month notified Shock Baitch and his wife Lisa (Friedman) Baitch that foreclosure action will start today – Christmas eve – unless the couple agrees to put their home up for a forced sale.
Why?
Because another unit of Bank of America erroneously reported to credit agencies that the family was seeking a loan modification, ruining their credit rating and as the result putting their mortgage into default.
All this is happening even though the bank – after admitting it erred and sent a letter of apology in September – handed this case to a special unit at Bank of America that is charged with dealing with severe customer issues. It promised to notify the credit reporting agencies that the couple were not deadbeats, but were good credit risks.
Just to compound the error the Bank proceeded to wreck the couple’s credit rating as well, and then deny the mortgage since they had low credit.
Their bank, Bank of America, had reported to credit bureaus that they were in a loan modification program. That was a red flag to many creditors, which either cut their lines of credit or placed their debts in the highest interest rate category – the Universal Default rate.
Baitch met several times with Bank of America managers who promised to correct the erroneous credit report, but were told it was too late to refinance her mortgage because their credit scores had been damaged.
“I begged them that they can’t do that in this case since they destroyed our credit scores,” Baitch told me. “Although they admitted to making the mistake, I was told they cannot change the underwriting rules. So, in a nutshell, the other creditors will not reinstate the old credit limits because they use the current credit reports, BofA will not help because they use the current credit reports, and my monthly minimum payments have more than doubled because of the Universal Default rate.”
Banks need to be held accountable for this type of behavior. It may be that the bank will have to pay damages to the Batch family, but this will not solve the problem of the credit score, nor change the behavior of the bank.
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