The BofA Apologies Continue For Wrongfully Seizing Homes

In Fort Worth, Texas, the Star Telegram reports:

• Freda Snowden's months-long ordeal to stop a bank from wrongly seizing a house her son owns in far south Fort Worth has ended. Bank of America apologized [] and agreed to pay for damage to the three-bedroom house on Oldham Court caused by agents the bank hired to secure the property for foreclosure. Snowden said bank executives admitted that their records had a coding error and know they have no claim to the property. She said it was frustrating trying to get anyone at the bank to listen to her, let alone return phone calls and e-mails.

***

• Snowden calls the ordeal, which sent her through several layers of bank bureaucracy to get the problem fixed, a nightmare. "If it's happening to me, how many other families is this happening to?" she said. "These last four months has taken at least 10 years off my life."

• The bank, she said, was preparing to foreclose on the previous owner. That person bought the house in March 2007 and defaulted on the loan nine months later, deed records show. [...] Snowden said her 29-year-old son bought the 1,460-square-foot house in a September 2008 foreclosure auction and moved in a month later. He put in new appliances, changed light fixtures and was enjoying his house, she said.

• That changed in November 2009, when he returned home one day to find that the house had been broken into. Nothing was taken, but someone had tried to re-key the home's locks. Not feeling safe, he put the house up for sale in December and moved out, she said.
  In February, the house was broken into again and the locks re-keyed. And again, nothing was taken. Police suggested that squatters might be entering the house, Snowden said.

• The mystery started to clear a few days later when a real estate agent was showing the house and an uninvited man walked in. When the agent asked why he was there, he said the bank hired his company to re-key the house because of a pending foreclosure. Snowden immediately called her son's lender and the title companies for the sale, she said. All assured her that yes, her son owned the house. "I started calling everyone at Bank of America. No one would talk to me," Snowden said.

For more, see Bank apologizes for error that nearly cost a Fort Worth man his home.