Bay Area Man Loses Home To Foreclosure Despite Remitting $27K To Reinstate Mortgage; Misplaced Cashier's Check, Failure To Apply Payment = More Of The Same At BofA

In San Francisco, California, the Center For Investigative Reporting and NBC Bay Area report:

• Joji Thomas was desperate to save his home. The San Francisco mechanical engineer sold his car, tapped into his wife’s savings and begged friends for money. In July, to stave off foreclosure, he bought a $27,777.85 cashier’s check and mailed it to Bank of America.
  
  Joji Thomas (right) directs movers as he packs up his home in San Ramon. Bank of America foreclosed on the house after the bank lost a $27,777.85 cashier’s check Thomas had sent in an effort to save the home.
  
  A bank representative acknowledged receiving the check two days later, Thomas said. But the payment went missing later that week and was not applied to his mortgage. Bank of America foreclosed on his home and sold it at auction. He moved out April 13.
  
  “I was forced into this,” he said as he cleared the furniture from his home. “I had no other choice.”
  
  Thomas is one of thousands of Bay Area homeowners fighting in court to save their homes from a foreclosure system rife with mistakes, mismanagement and even fraud, a joint investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting and NBC Bay Area has found.
  
  Despite recent settlements with state and federal regulators and a new California law that tightens rules for the mortgage industry, banks and their subsidiaries continue to file invalid documents and foreclose on properties to which they appear to have no legal right, an analysis of thousands of pages of property records and wrongful foreclosure lawsuits shows.
  
  At the center of much of this is Bank of America, which plays the largest role of any bank in Bay Area foreclosures. From July 2008 through October, Bank of America's foreclosure trustee, ReconTrust, handled 1 in 5 defaulted properties in the Bay Area, roughly 70 percent more than the next biggest trustee, according to RealtyTrac Inc., a real estate information company. During the past five years, 184,000 Bay Area properties went into default; last year, the value of these loans exceeded $11.6 billion.
  
  Jay Patterson, a forensic accountant and certified fraud examiner in Arkansas; Ben Weber, who formerly worked for the city of San Francisco analyzing property records; and Marie McDonnell, a private auditor in Massachusetts, reviewed hundreds of loan documents and property records for this story at the request of CIR and NBC Bay Area.
  
  All three agreed there is evidence that Bank of America and its subsidiaries skirted proper procedures in foreclosure filings. These practices included lying on fraudulent loan transfers and altering dates on property records, which allowed Bank of America to initiate foreclosure and collect payments and fees for home loans it did not own.
  
  Patterson said an average homeowner looking through property records cannot tell if they are fraudulent; a public document that appears to transfer ownership of a mortgage can be fabricated. Patterson traced the true chain of ownership for mortgages on behalf of CIR and found that in many cases, banks were filing false documents.
  
  “Banks didn’t have them and were making them up to foreclose,” said Patterson, who serves as an expert witness for plaintiffs' attorneys in wrongful foreclosure lawsuits.
  
  “Land records are supposed to be the true representation of who owns the land," he said. "But what you’ve seen in the last 10 years is the bastardization of these records, and it might take another 100 years to straighten them out.”

For more, see Error claims cast doubt on Bank of America foreclosures in Bay Area.

Thanks to Deontos for the heads-up on this story.