To: Bank of America
Attn: Collection Recovery Department
Gayle Westmoreland

From: Wendell Clay Weger

Re: Follow up letter of complaint

Gayle,

Per our conversation, here is a letter explaining the events that have occurred as I know them to be.

In January of 1997, I leased a 1997 Ford Expedition from Lee Jarmon Ford in Carrollton, Texas. As you will find, the lease was for a period of 4 years. As such, I paid every month for the full term of the agreement. In late November of 2000, I received an unsolicited call from a Bank of America representative named Suzanne (I still have my notes from the call along with an 800 number to call her back). She informed me that my term was up and that I had three choices: continue to pay monthly payments, purchase the vehicle for the remaining balance, or simply return the vehicle to the dealership where I bought it.

I elected the last option. I fully expected to pay a disposition fee of $350.00 and a mileage overage charge of about $1,000.00 or so. What I received from Bank of America was an invoice for over $8,300.00. This invoice was sent to me in mid April of 2001 over three months after the return of the vehicle. This is the only correspondence that I ever received from Bank of America of any kind regarding final payment.

I contacted Bank of America to dispute these charges. A few weeks went by and I received a call from one of your representatives who asked me if the bill was correct and if I was going to pay it. I asked the lady (whose name I do not recall or have note of) if she would please call me back to resolve this matter….that the bill was not correct…..and that I would not pay it. The reason I asked her to call me back is that I was on the other line with SBC installing a DSL into my house and I actually had a human on the phone with which to work. She said she would call me back so I went on about my day. She never called back. Given that it had taken three months to receive my first invoice and that it wasn’t correct, and that it had taken a few weeks to get a call back, I wasn’t too concerned when I didn’t hear back from Bank of America for some time.

The first time that I knew I had a problem was when I went to refinance a Jeep Wrangler that I had paid cash for back in February of 2001. I went to University Federal Credit Union, in May, with the title in my hand to obtain financing and was rejected for financing for the first time in my life. When I asked the lady why, she said she couldn’t tell me and that I would have to get a copy of my credit report. I did get a copy of my credit report and it confirmed for me what she did eventually tell me. She told me that she couldn’t finance my Jeep Wrangler due to the fact that I had just had my 1997 Ford Expedition repossessed. I was finally able to get the financing at a higher interest rate using my wife’s credit.

Needless to say, when I found that my credit had been decimated by Bank of America, your bank was the first party that I called to rectify this matter upon which it was summarily explained to me that my account had been charged off and that I would need to deal with the collection agency. Nice.

I have been dealing with your various collection agencies now for the last 5 years. I have asked them repeatedly to turn my account back over to Bank of America and they always refuse to do so because they see no benefit in it to them, right? They call us and harass us on a quarterly basis. We always tell them the same thing. We don’t owe the money and we aren’t paying the bill. They tell us that they will continue to damage our credit each month by way of update and we tell them that to do so will only liable them as well as you. We also have told them repeatedly to contact our lawyer, Wes Ritchie, 512.477.4242 x 14 as we have done everything we can to resolve this matter. In short, the credit agency has no incentive to help us and Bank of America won’t deal with us because we have been charged off and sent to collection.

What you will find is that we did, in fact, have a 4 year agreement with you which we honored in every way including the safe return of the property to Dallas even though we live in Austin. I have proof in my hands and so do you. The problem seems to have occurred when someone entered the origination date of our loan as January 1996 instead of January 1997. This seems to have made our deal to look like a 5 year deal in your systems instead of a 4 year deal. Nonetheless, it didn’t stop Suzanne from calling us at the end of 4 years and giving us our three options that I outlined above. Maybe she thought it was a five year deal based on the origination and that it was the expiration date…who knows….because after we did what Suzanne asked us to do, Bank of America declared our vehicle repossessed and charged off the account. It’s all a bit confusing, isn’t it? When you get the documents out of microfiche, I believe you will see the inconsistencies to which I am referring. The documents show varying dates and number of payments. The fact is that the vehicle was titled to us in February of 1997 with 256 miles on it. We kept it 4 years as agreed and returned it to Dallas at Bank of America’s request. I have a Merlin screen shot that shows that the transaction was for 59 months starting in January of 1996 (I presume before the vehicle was even manufactured). Was our deal for four years starting January of 1997 or was it five years beginning in January of 1996 before Ford ever delivered the truck from the production line?

As I mentioned to you over the phone, I was able to finally understand exactly what happened by opening a checking account at one your branch locations and getting one of your bankers to print out Merlin Screen shots with my information on it. One of those Merlin screen shots had your phone number on it. You are the first person at Bank of America who hasn’t told me that they can’t help me because my account was sent to collection.

In summary, I’m sure you need to get the files out and review them. As I stated on the phone, I am not interested in resolving this six months from now. I want this expunged from my credit record ASAP. In addition, I am assimilating the actual financial damages that I have incurred over the last 5 years along with damages that I will continue to incur in the future based on Bank of America’s errors and reporting to the credit bureaus. Needless to say, it has been a very difficult, angering, and time consuming experience that we have endured particularly after working very diligently for over 11 years (right out of college) at paying our bills on time to maintain the excellent credit we once had.

I am copying my attorney on this letter. Feel free to have your counsel contact him directly as his number is included in the body of this letter.

Clay Weger