We had a home mortgage with Wells Fargo when my husband was laid off from work. They had managed it incompetently and made several mistakes with the escrow account, etc. We fell two months behind, because he was out of work for six months. He called to get help, and they told him no problem, since he now had a job, we were theperfect candidates for a program where they just added those two late months to the end of the mortgage. It might take up to 21 days to get that set up, they said, and they would pursue no action against until then. This was their Loss Mitigation Dept.
We were SO relieved. Then they "lost" our paperwork and made other delays, so that months went by while they got us set up on this plan. They wouldn't accept partial payments, and they said the time would be added to the end of the mortgage, so we used the mortgage payments for those months to try to catch up on other bills. When we started the process, we were two months late.By the time they finished losing the paperwork, closing the case, reopening it when we proved we had sent the paperwork, etc., we were five months late.
In spite of assurances, they did puruse collection action, as we discovered when we got a foreclosure notice.
At that time, they told us there was no plan like the one we'd been told about, but for more money up front than we had originally owed, they offered to set us up on a plan where our mortgage would almost triple for ten months. They changed from nice and reassuring to nasty. They demanded an extra thousand dollars with less than eight hours' notice. They paid no attention to the fact that we were only in foreclosure at all because they had delayed our case and lied to us about continuing collection action.
We had no choice, so we put family relationships in jeopardy and borrowed the money.
They ate it.
They used it pay attorneys they would never had hired if they hadn't caused the delays that led to foreclosure. They paid themselves fees. They didn't apply it to the months we were behind at all. We made one mortgage payment to them, and they sold the mortage—and they sold it as four months behind!
The new company, EMC, kept telling us we weren't in the system and wouldn't give us an account number or address to pay them for two months. They said they don't worry if you're late with the first two months. Our first written contact with them (we kept calling and trying to pay) after the "we bought your mortgage, we'll send you a statement later" letter was a foreclosure notice.
Why is that in a complaint about Wells Fargo? Well, Wells Fargo clearly knew what they were doing to us. After all the lies, the "lost" paperwork (twice), the other delays, the demeaning and angry comments to us as we kept asking them to keep their word, after they took our money and ate it—they wrote to tell us they'd sold the mortgage and cautioned us to be sure to pay it. They said to send the regular amount to the new company.
But the new company, as Wells Fargo clearly knew, wanted to make its own fees, and they would not provide us with an address to pay our mortgage. Fortuantely, we saved the money this time and were able to make a second devil's deal, with a big down payment and exorbitant monthly payments.
The worst part of all is that this last-chance, sleazy little company is charging us less per month than Wells Fargo. They're only making us pay twice the original amount of our payments. Wells Fargo's deal called for more than three times that amount.
The people in the loss mitigation department at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage are dishonest and without conscience, especially the supervisor. I actually felt bad for the poor woman who had set up our plan and was then forced by him to demand an extra thousand dollars by the close of the business day.
Because of that extra thousand, we had to do a voluntary repo on my car.
I talked to a former Wells Fargo employee about this, and she said their offices are filled with temps, mistakes are made all the time, and they never admit it or fix them. Even our insurance broker said they hate working with Wells Fargo because of the mistakes, lies, and unprofessionalism.
We went with Wells Fargo because they were half a point lower than the competition. We have never regretted a decision more.
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