In Oct. 2008, a mother of four in Illinois needed to unload her house or face foreclosure. So she worked with Chase Home Financial and got them to agree to a short sale. Unfortunately, more than a year later not everyone at Chase knows the house was sold, because they’re telling the former homeowner she owes almost $45,000 in late payments.

Several months after the sale, she began getting letters from Chase requesting proof of insurance on the home. Puzzled as to why they’d want her to insure a house she no longer owned, she called Chase and was told the oversight was due to a backlog in the loan department.

She continued to receive letters and continued to call Chase, who continued to blame the backlog. The former homeowner says she made over 50 phone calls during this time.

And then, in Jan. 2009, she gets a call from a Chase rep telling her she’d missed a bunch of loan payments and that she now owed them $43,000.

Even after her lawyer got involved and demonstrated that she no longer owned the home, Chase continued to list the loan as open.

She eventually contacted Jon “The Problem Solver” Yates at the Chicago Tribune, who finally got a Chase bigwig to fix the situation.

Or so it appeared.

Two weeks after her story appeared in the paper, Chase was back at it again, contacting the beleaguered former homeowner to tell her she’d missed 27 payments and that the now owes $44,920.67.

Here’s how a Chase mouthpiece attempted to explain the continued error:

What they did is they pulled a call list, and they didn’t exclude certain things that they should have. Now this account has been marked throughout the system. It was just our caller that made a mistake.

Yes, they didn’t “exclude certain things,” like the fact that she’d sold her house 18 months earlier.

Ghost charges from Chase reappear [Chicago Tribune]

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