Driving a mile a minute means New York is 2,444 mph from L.A.
About 30 years ago a guy in California won a small claims action against Wells Fargo. They didn’t pay. He went back to court and had their stagecoach seized.
They paid.
Five years after buying my house I still frequently get mail from collection agencies, addressed to the previous owners. I gave up trying to get them to change their records. Stories like this make me nervous.
There is a reason cases like this don’t go to court, and it has nothing to do with evil corporate lawyers perverting the legal system or forcing their will on the helpless owners. The lawyers for the corporation look at the case, determine that there is no plausible defense, and tell the company to get out the checkbook.
Do they offer what the plaintiffs might be able to get in court? Probably not, but they do offer enough to keep plaintiffs from turning them down - as evidenced by the lack of (even losing) court cases.
It’s not really related. The correct house got foreclosed, the contractors went to the wrong address.
And while I am at it, the people didn’t lose “all of their worldly possessions.” They didn’t even live there. The guy owned the house with his sisters, lived somewhere else and only even visited the place a like three times a year. He certainly did have a lot of valuable things there and this doesn’t materially matter with respect to the bank’s culpability but we really need to tone down the hyperbole.
Some of this is dependent on individual state/province foreclosure laws. But I am quite certain that the personal property of a person or persons whose real property has been foreclosed on may be removed by said persons, or if removed by the foreclosing authority, must be stored for them to claim for a variable, specified period.
You mean we shouldn’t go and string up Warren Buffet?
Are you saying there is no amount of money the couple could receive in settlement which would change their status from “fucked over” to “not fucked over”?
So…who at Wells Fargo has been fired?
So, I am not now, but in the very recent past, owned a company that did just this. The procedure is called a trash out. I’d be the contractor hired by a larger firm that contracts with the bank to do anything from cutting the grass, to securing the property, to trash outs.
Who is responsible for the address fuckup lies somewhere between the bank and the middleman contractor almost certainly. The thing that is appalling to me is that whomever the field contractor was who went out there didn’t think to themselves that something was obviously off. There wouldn’t have been any of the usual postings around the windows, there wouldn’t have been a lock box, and here’s the big thing that should have made them think twice…The house was presumably in relatively good order. Normally when we go to a trashout the place is an absolute shithole disaster. It’s almost always filthy as hell and looks like a lunatic went on some sort of destructive bender. Higher end properties are usually pretty clean and have a minimum of stuff to remove if anything, but it is also usually obvious that nobody is living there. I have never in three years walked into a place that looked occupied by anything other than squatters, and if I had, I would have initiated some sort of questioning and report that confirmation is needed, because something is really not right. The contractor may have done that, I don’t know.
I’m dying to know who the contractor was. The place is within my former territory, and I have a hunch I know who it is. If my hunch is correct, the whole thing is fucked up from the floor up because I’ve never met stupider people in my whole life, and it would be no surprise if it actually was their fault.
I’m kind of off and on busy over the next couple of days, but I’ll be happy to try and answer questions.
Maybe, but they might just be so incompetent that they ignore the lawsuit entirely:
I don’t think you read my post very carefully. My POINT was that the couple should force the case to court, using donations from people who hate Wells-Fargo to pay their legal fees. Then, after Wells-Fargo appealed the case higher, the couple should fight the bank all the way to the top, using donations to cover their legal fees. The whole point is two-fold:
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To get them their money
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To, figuratively-speaking, beat the shit out of the bank, very publicly.
Fuck a non-disclosure agreement. It’s time for public humiliation for the bank.
My point is that you don’t have a clue how the legal system works. Such a scenario couldn’t really happen.
Here is how I think that this went down. Again, I have done a lot of speculation.
- HouseA is properly foreclosed.
- BankEmployeeA fills out the paperwork with the correct address. Per policy they also attach a picture of the house with GPS coordinates that they grabbed off of the internet. The picture and coordinates end up being wrong. This is ironic because the intent of the policy is to prevent what happened. This sort of mistake has never happened before.
- ContractorA takes the info goes to the wrong address but the picture is right so they clean out the house. They assume that ContractorA screwed up.
- The bank is informed of the mistake. BankEmployeeB reviews the paperwork and it looks in order since the address is correct. Maybe they even double check the internet info.
- ContractorB is sent to do the job right and does the same thing as ContractorA.
Who is at fault? The bank, of course. Something slipped through the cracks. They need to change the way they do things and compensate the couple which for now it looks like they intend to do.
Who should be fired? No one. It was a weird series of errors that is only obvious in retrospect.
Great post. The contractor could share some blame too. Remember though that no one lived in that house. The owner only went to the place a two or three times a year to putter in the garage with his tools. He just stored stuff there. It may not have looked lived in.
What scenario, where Wells-Fargo has a huge judgement against them and then appeals it as high as they can?
No, seriously, I’m asking.
If they can’t come to an agreement, the Court will force a settlement conference where both sides have to make a good faith offer. The couple has to make an offer and it can’t be something ridiculous like five billion dollars. If WF accepts their offer, it’s all over.
If they can’t come to terms, it will go to trial. The outcome of the trial is how it has to go. (If the jury awards more than the couple’s offer, the bank pays all court costs. If the jury awards less than the bank offer, the couple pays all costs. If it’s in between, each pays their own costs.)
No one can appeal just because they don’t like how it ended up. Their has to be grounds for appeal which are things like procedural errors or malfeasance on the part of the lawyers or errors in the way the law was applied.
IANAL so I may have some details wrong but this is basically how it goes.
Questions:
What are the fail safes during trash-outs? Do the contractors report their activities to the local police? How long do they keep the crap before it gets auctioned or trashed? (Varies by state presumably).
Faruiza: “There wouldn’t have been any of the usual postings around the windows, there wouldn’t have been a lock box, and here’s the big thing that should have made them think twice…”
Um, shouldn’t there be a checklist procedure to verify you have the correct GD house?
For the contractor - an address, picture and potentially a GPS should be enough. Would you expect the contractor to go to the court house to verify that the foreclosure was filed correctly?
well, hijario, if YANAL, or even a paralegal, I’m not sure I’d try to answer the question.
And I wasn’t remotely wrong. There CAN be appeals. Do you really think the bank’s lawyers wouldn/t/couldn’t find a way? Dude, look who we’re talking about here.