At the end of last month, I received a frantic call from my assistant telling me that the Wells Fargo customer service reps she spoke with on the phone refused to release a client’s documents that we requested in order to complete our investigation.

Before I get what happened next, here’s a hint for homeowners. If you call Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, insist on talking to their office in Des Moines, Iowa office or else you’ll be patched through to some Pakistani or Filipino call center that Wells Fargo partnered up with using their TARP money.  If you really want to freak out the person from Wells Fargo inform them you are recording the call and make sure you record it even if they disconnect the call and keep calling because it’s always good for some laughs at your next party or to help you keep your sanity when you feel they are about to push you over the edge.  Don’t forget this is a company that prides itself for driving their homeowners to suicide.

So anyway, back to the story. I get back to the office and do a conference call with my client and the people at Wells Fargo Mortgage Home Mortgage in Iowa.  After I introduce myself and my client, the Wells Fargo representative (we’ll call her Donna) says she will not speak to me or my client if I am on the call.  So after about 25 minutes of my client and I arguing with Donna over why she won’t discuss the contents of my client’s file with me on the phone we insist on speaking to a manager.  We get a manager’s voice mail and leave her a message.

After not hearing anything from Wells Fargo for about two hours, I get my client on the phone and we call this manager on a conference call.

Here’s another hint, if you’re trying to get results from Wells Fargo, hound them like a bill collector and feel free to unleash your inner Biff Tannen, the obnoxious bully from the Back To The Future movies.  It annoys the crap out of them to the point where they’ll give you what you want just to get you off the phone.

So my client and I call this Wells Fargo manager and go through the whole story about Donna and wanting the documents and how my assistant not only sent the request three times by confirmed fax but she also sent three times via certified mail.  After another 30 minutes of explanations, we get put on hold and are forced to endure the Muzak versions of Ozzy Osbourne songs.  I don’t know if you ever heard a Muzak version of Diary Of A Madman, but it tends re-enforce the theory from the 1980s that Ozzy inserted subliminal messages into his song promoting Satanism.  No, I’m not surprised by the irony that Wells Fargo picked music with rumored satanic messages.

So now after 15 minutes, a different woman comes on the phone and this woman apparently knew who I was and had actually read not only my articles about Wells Fargo but was familiar with the articles Martin Andelman had written about Wells Fargo as well because she told my client, “Wells Fargo will not release these documents to you as long as you are a client of MFI-Miami!”

Naturally, I forced the issue and demanded to know why.  At this point she responds, “Because we find the lies you write about Wells Fargo are despicable.”

Lois Griffin from Family Guy

She droned on about some bizarre theory about how I’m an opportunist who is feeding on the misery of homeowners that I’ve made a career out of trashing the “good” name of Wells Fargo.  She tried to claim that people like me and my friend, Beth Jacobson, who blew the whistle on the Wells Fargo’s practice of  ”Ghetto Loans” are responsible for the continuation of the housing crisis.

The first thing that popped into my head after hearing this was Lois Griffin from Family Guy chastising Peter, “Peter, hold on to that thought, because I’m gonna explain to you when we get home all the things that are wrong with that statement.”  in response to Peter’s observation, “Yeah Brian, your doing the same thing that Mia Farrow did to that Chinaman that Woody Allen brought home from the circus! “  

This woman’s claim that Martin Andelman and Beth Jacobson and I are some how responsible for the never ending foreclosure crisis is filled with as many inaccuracies as Peter Griffin’s summary of Woody Allen’s affair and later marriage to his step-daughter, Soon-Yi Previn.

So after doing an hour what felt like we were stuck on Bald Bull while playing the old NES version of Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, I told the woman all she was doing was giving me material to write another negative article about Wells Fargo and that Wells Fargo was facing a federal lawsuit from my client.  As luck would have it, my assistant burst into my office to inform me that my client’s attorney was calling on another line.  I brought him on the call and he immediately he told this Wells Fargo executive what he would do if she didn’t release the documents.  Apparently, between the threats of litigation and another round of negative PR for Wells Fargo was enough because she finally caved and MFI-Miami received the documents three days later.

So what’s up with the cattiness of this Wells Fargo executive? Well, I later found out it had to do with an article I wrote back in June about how Wells Fargo offered special “gifts” to their wholesale brokers.  It appears that Wells Fargo executives not only in Iowa but at the corporate offices in San Francisco were so incensed about the article that the order came from the top of the corporate pyramid not to cooperate with any Wells Fargo homeowners that are clients of MFI-Miami.

I can’t say this is the first time Wells Fargo had done something catty like this.  In 2010, when I was listed as a witness on five different lawsuits against Wells Fargo, a manager from Wells Fargo Home Mortgage instructed one of his loan officers to write on a website dedicated to the lending industry that I was once arrested for “raping 14 year old girls in my parents’ basement”.  We later learned from the site host the comments were from a user using a Wells Fargo server.  Wells Fargo immediately fired the employees to avoid an investigation into witness coercion by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit.

So it appears that Alexis, Krystle and rest of those crazy women who entertained us back in the 1980s with their cattiness and their cat fights seem to have become the model of behavior for executives at Wells Fargo.

Original linkOriginal author: Steve Dibert