Vladimir Kremlev for RT
Matthew Weidner, a lawyer representing homeowners, said falling victim to contractor break-ins is easier than one might imagine.
“If you are 45 days late on your mortgage payments, the bank can send out thugs to do a property inspection and break into your home,”he told the Huffington Post.“People need to understand how dangerous this is. Someone is going to get [accidentally] shot.”
Sometimes, banks wrongfully foreclose on a house. In 2010, California homeowner Mimi Ash returned from a weekend trip to find her entire house empty. The bank had taken all of her possessions – including the ashes of her dead husband, which she had kept in a wooden box.
Ash had not been alerted of a foreclosure, and the distraught woman filed a lawsuit against Bank of America.
“Every day, smaller wrongs happen to people trying to save their homes: being charged the wrong amount of money, being wrongly denied a loan modification, being asked to hand over documents four or five times,”said Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.
The inspector general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency says the problem comes from the lack of contractor oversight and accountability. Banks are wrongfully charging for unnecessary inspections, failing to maintain abandoned homes, and leaving decisions on whether or not to enter a home up to local contractors.
“When people borrow money to buy a house, they don’t anticipate that someone may one day drive by their home and make a determination on their own about whether it is vacant or not, and then possibly change their locks and go through their stuff,”a circuit court judge told the Huffington Post.
Safeguard chief executive Alan Jaffa told the New York Times in 2010 that many of the foreclosure-related horror stories are rumors.
“There is a stigma that we go in, kick the door in and throw grandma out head first and board up the windows,”he said.
But while Safeguard may not have forcefully removed any residents, the company is now facing dozens of lawsuits from angry Americans who lost their valuables, furniture, security and even pets to bank contractors that wrongfully entered their homes.
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