My friend is losing her home of over 25years due to social security's mistake-how nasty can it get

[haele]

35. My father was overpaid for three years when he first signed up for Social Security...

Don't know how or why they glitched it in 2003, but it took them around three years to bring his allotment back down to what it should have been; he was given the option to pay back at around $50 a month or pay a lump sum of almost $2800.
He didn't know he was getting more money, between what they told him he was supposed to be getting and the COLAs.
There were also a couple years over the past 20 in which there was a COLA increase between 3% and 6%, and it could be easy to not to notice that the $120 increase a month really should have been $60, because one would think they didn't need to check the Government's math.