Wells Fargo Employee Admits She Approved 500 Foreclosures Per Day Without Reading The Paperwork

[marmar]

AP, via HuffPost:



WASHINGTON — Wells Fargo & Co. does not plan to halt foreclosures despite an employee's testimony that she signed up to 500 foreclosure documents daily without reading them.

The employee of the San Francisco-based bank said in a deposition taken last March that she signed between 300 and 500 foreclosure documents per day, verifying only her name and title.

Such practices have been called into question by attorneys general in 50 states. They have accused mortgage companies of violating state laws.

Wells has not halted foreclosures and says it has discovered no problems in the legal documents used to process them. The company said earlier in the week that it would review pending foreclosures for potential defects. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/15/wells-fargo-foreclosures-halt_n_764018.html

[Posteritatis]

1. This employee strikes me as tragically unimprisoned... (nt)

[pnwmom]

7. I think we should give her a medal. Her testimony was invaluable.

You think we should blame the underlings who were paid peanuts to do this? Who often didn't even know what a mortgage or a notary public was?

[Posteritatis]

11. If they're kicking people out of their homes that casually? Yes. (nt)

[pnwmom]

12. She was just a cog in the machine. We should be going after

the OWNERS of the machine.

[Posteritatis]

15. No, we should *also* be going after them.

Someone doesn't get Poor Downtrodden Proletariat points in my book if they're potentially rendering three to five hundred families per day homeless without the slightest effort of making sure if they're warranted or not.

Everyone involved in that process needs a nice bowl of consequences, and I see no reason why the person who signs off on the process of rendering thousands of people homeless with that much indifference should get the tiniest shred of sympathy. If she's a cog, then she's a vile, malign cog which has wrecked thousands of lives.

[pnwmom]

16. Many of the people hired didn't even know what a mortgage was.

Or what a foreclosure was, or what a notary public was.

They purposely hired what they called "burger king kids" for the job -- people who wouldn't know any better.

[Posteritatis]

17. Those terms are all over the place, and they could always ask someone

I don't accept "didn't know any better" for these kinds of actions. Every single person who was doing that should be punished, just as every single person above them in the chain encouraging it to go on should be. I absolutely refuse to sympathise with someone who threw a couple thousand people out of their homes per day just because they were too ignorant to know what they were doing and too stupid or selfish to correct their ignorance.

[pnwmom]

18. The only reason we're going to be able to prosecute the higher ups

is because of the testimony we're getting from whistleblowers now. These are the small fry, totally unimportant in the large scheme of things. And they didn't throw anyone out of their homes -- their employers did.

[pnwmom]

19. Fortunately, you're not the prosecutor. Or the judge, or the jury.

The only reason we're going to be able to prosecute the higher ups is because of the testimony we're getting from whistleblowers now. These are the small fry, totally unimportant in the large scheme of things. And they didn't throw anyone out of their homes -- their employers did.

[pnwmom]

20. Fortunately, you're not the prosecutor. Or the judge, or the jury.

The only reason we're going to be able to prosecute the higher ups is because of the testimony we're getting from whistleblowers now. These are the small fry, totally unimportant in the large scheme of things. And they didn't throw anyone out of their homes -- their employers did.

[JVS]

8. I blame the employee's supervisor.

[dkf]

2. Why do people do these things?

I don't get it.

[pnwmom]

9. Someone gets hired for $10 or $15 an hour, they usually just do

whatever their employer tells them to do. The banks purposely hired people with no banking experience to do these jobs.

[Hannah Bell]

21. you could make the same argument about corner drug dealers.

[sakabatou]

3. *facepalm*

[gratuitous]

4. Don't worry, Wells Fargo

You're going to have a lot of people reviewing your pending foreclosures. And if every t isn't crossed and every i isn't dotted, you'll have a very expensive and very fun time explaining how you're trying to foreclose on a property you can't prove you own. Hope you like paying attorney fees.

[TheMadMonk]

5. Except their attorneys are on what amounts to a salary.

On the other hand every poor little bastard has to go into hock up to his neck to simply have a chance of holding their lender to the terms of the contract as actually written let alone voiding it entirely.

It costs the banks the filing fee to get a court clerk to stamp a piece of paper. It costs you and every other plaintif each $200 in legal fees for your attorney to file on your behalf. Their attorneys are paid the same whether in court or warming their chairs. Yours and mine charge like wounded bulls just to answer the phone and rub salt into the wound by sending a final bill for opening your thankyou note.

They don't have to win, just leave you too battered to continue the fight.

[csziggy]

13. The DOJ and State Attorneys should be sending in people to help out

The average people who are getting foreclosed on. Since there is not clear evidence of illegal activity on the banks side, every single transaction by them should be scrutinized.

But the DOJ is too busy defending taking away the rights of citizens to bother enforcing laws against abuse by the banks.

[Egnever]

6. hmmm

8 hours in a work day, 60 minutes in an hour thats 480 minutes a day.... She signed one a minute every day? They worked her like a dog!

[Up2Late]

14. I worked jobs like that...when I was a temp.

Now WAY I would ever do that kind of job if it was signing legal documents I hadn't read, no way! Still I hope this person doesn't take the fall for this massive bank's wrong doing.

[TexasObserver]

10. recommend

[CoffeeCat]

22. Wells Fargo Financial doesn't exist anymore...

Wells Fargo Financial closed its doors last spring--and that entire
business evaporated into thin air. Gone.

I wonder how these questionable foreclosures will be handled, given
that the company that foreclosed is no longer operating. Wells
Fargo is still up and running though.

It's all just a big mess, any way you look at it.