THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And steal is the operative word because Bank of America was well aware all the time that they were taking her money that her husband had bought an insurance policy to keep her in the house. They knew because they made her husband buy the policy.

Biggs was the subject of a story by McClatchy in December 2013 that documented how she was about to lose her home days before Christmas. Bank of America’s bill collector was telling her the home was not her husband’s primary residence. It couldn’t be: He was dead. Mitchell did reside on the premises – in an urn.

The McClatchy report helped stall the foreclosure. In the months that followed, Bank of America’s subsidiary offered Biggs a mortgage modification that added more than $30,000 in miscellaneous fees and legal fees and charges to the loan. That would have sucked out the equity she’d built up in the home. Her pro bono lawyer demanded a list of specifics on the fees.

One stood out to George Bosch, a legal administrator who worked on her case for the Los Angeles law firm of Edward Lopez. It was passed off as a fee but didn’t seem normal. Was it an insurance premium, he asked?

“Silence on the other end of the phone. They didn’t want to answer the question,” said Bosch.

A few days later, the answer came. Yes, it was an insurance premium, for a policy underwritten by Miami-based American Bankers Life Assurance Co. of Florida.

Her late husband had taken out a $100,000 policy with the original mortgage with NationsCredit Financial Services Corp., the subsidiary of Bank of America that specialized in lending to poor borrowers. He owed about $120,000 on the home when he died. That should have left his widow – now sole owner of the house – with little problem in paying off, over time, the remainder of the loan.

Instead, when she fell on hard times in 2011, Select Portfolio Servicing began a two-year move on behalf of the lender to take her home – even as they continued to collect the premiums on the insurance policy.

“I didn’t know that the insurance policy existed . . . but I had told them about my husband passing,” Biggs told McClatchy in an interview. “They had several opportunities to tell me that there was a life insurance policy, and they just didn’t.”

The law appears murky on notification requirements, but lawyers for Biggs argue that she should have been afforded the basic contractual obligations of good faith and fair dealing.

A spokesman for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said there were no hard numbers for how many complaints the bureau had received from surviving family members like Biggs about such insurance issues. But the treatment of mortgages and surviving family members is a big enough concern that the bureau established new protections that took effect in January 2014. Last November, the bureau proposed additional rules to make it harder for lenders and their bill collectors to foreclose on properties that have passed to surviving spouses or children.

There is no reason for a bank to be doing this except when senior management is squeezing the minions to "make their numbers" by any means possible. And when you have a major bank constantly in deep shit being run by a bozo who was the only one who wanted the job, this level of fraud is both understandable and very likely rife throughout the organization.