This sounds like a story you've heard before, but it's new. And the house was completely paid for and did NOT have a mortgage. Lastly, Wells Fargo paid no attention to the couple's complaints until the local media got involved.
Long live the banks and the kind souls who administer them.
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Wells Fargo employees wrongfully foreclosed a modest home in a small town in California, removing and destroying nearly all of an old couple’s belongings, twice.
Alvin and Pat Tjosaas, who have been married for 56 years, lost three generations worth of their belongings when a contracted foreclosure crew accidentally broke into the wrong house. The Tjosaas had no mortgage on the house that Alvin had built with his dad as a teenager.
“Good news, we know who took it: Wells Fargo. Bad news, the stuff is all gone,” Alvin Tjosaas told CBS Los Angeles.
Subcontractors hired by the bank broke doors, smashed windows and stole valuables while foreclosing the couple's vacation home near Twentynine Palms.
A 14-year-old Alvin had build the house brick by brick with his dad in 1961 and has taken his family and kids there ever since.
“I put my whole life into this place, building it for my mom and dad,” he told ABC News.
“I know every inch, every rock… my mom mixed all the cement by hand,” he told CBS.
While the costly mistake was at the fault of Wells Fargo, the bank only recently started responding to the incident after the media got ahold of the story.
“The way it’s been going, I don’t think they really care. That’s the way it’s been for three months. Now, all of a sudden, it’s you guys,” Alvin said in an ABC interview, referring to the media. “Now, all of a sudden, they call me.”
Wells Fargo released a statement of apology for the losses suffered by the Tjosaas family and said they are moving quickly to “resolve this unfortunate situation in an attempt to right this wrong.”
However, over Labor Day weekend, Alvin Tjosaas, went to check on the home and saw that it had been broken into and "vandalized" again.
The Tjosaases later learned Wells Fargo had hired another contractor who made the same mistake as the first.
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Stories from earlier today:
Wells Fargo Just Fired A Man For Stealing A Dime In 1963
Whalen & Jonathan Weil On 'Questionable Accounting At Wells Fargo'