Not being a Bank of America customer won’t protect you from the company’s formidable foreclosure machine, but if you are a customer, paying off your entire mortgage doesn’t help, either. After an Illinois woman sent a check for more than $60,000 to pay off her mortgage, she learned that the company hadn’t applied the money in her escrow account to the principal as they were supposed to, putting her in default. The company helpfully came after her to collect the money she supposedly owed and help her avoid foreclosure.

“They have so insulated themselves that the manager that I spoke to had supposedly no access to a fax machine, no e-mail address that could be accessed from outside of BofA, and you could never reach them directly by phone,” she told the Chicago Tribune. Sounds familiar.

The Tribune’s consumer columnist intervened and was able to get the bank’s attention.

Problem: Paying off mortgage results in default [Chicago Tribune] (Thanks, Marty!)

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