Hundreds of Wells Fargo Customers Lost Their Homes Due to a 'Calculation Error'

Banking giant Wells Fargo admitted last week that as many as 400 homeowners were accidentally foreclosed upon after a “calculation error” in their accounting software which “affected certain accounts that were in the foreclosure process between April 13, 2010, and October 20, 2015, when the error was corrected.”

The admission that hundreds of people were completely screwed over by a computer glitch came in the bank’s most recent SEC filing, which stated that (emphasis mine):

As a result of this error, approximately 625 customers were incorrectly denied a loan modification or were not offered a modification in cases where they would have otherwise qualified. In approximately 400 of these instances, after the loan modification was denied or the customer was deemed ineligible to be offered a loan modification, a foreclosure was completed.

According to the filing, the discovery of this consumer-fucking computer error came after “an internal review of the Company’s use of a mortgage loan modification underwriting tool.”

This is the latest scandal involving the massive financial institution, which this spring was fined $1 billion by the government for its transparently crooked predatory practices, including forcing customers to buy unnecessary auto-insurance, opening more than a million deposit accounts without the customer’s permission, and applying for credit cards for more than half a million customers without actually telling them they were going to do so.

In their SEC filing, the bank promised it will “continue to assess any customer harm and provide remediation as appropriate.” To that end, it claims it will set aside $8 million for homeowners “whose modification decisions may have been affected by the calculation error.”