Let’s rewind to 2020. We were a few weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic. The country shut down, many of us were stuck at home and uncertainty reigned supreme.

My household was thrown into chaos. With three young sons, a dog and a cat, life was already hard enough to manage for me and my husband, Chase. Suddenly being stuck in our house 24/7 — not to mention managing our jobs while trying to keep the kiddos fed, entertained and up to date with their online school — was extremely difficult. 

As a journalist, I was busier than ever. But Chase is a self-employed machinist, and working with huge lathes in his home shop wasn’t exactly compatible with juggling everything. So, we decided Chase would put his business on pause for a bit to manage the kids while I ensured my paycheck kept coming.

“It just made the most sense for me to stop working for a while,” said Chase (who kindly agreed to let me interview him as long as I promised to never make him listen to this story on “Marketplace”). 

Sure, handling the kids got easier, but the change also significantly reduced our household income. Like millions of other people in similar situations, we started worrying about our largest monthly expense: The Mortgage. 

At the time, a lot of lenders were talking about forbearance. Basically, a kind of temporary relief that allows borrowers to pause or reduce mortgage payments. Things like the CARES Act made forbearance easier than ever. But it also comes with trade-offs, like potentially extending the life of your loan.

Chase and I both vaguely remember Wells Fargo sending us something about it. 

“But then we looked into it for not very long at all and realized, ‘Oh, no, we should not do that,’” said Chase. “Taking a month off of our mortgage felt more like a trap than something that we should do.”

So, we decided against it. We scrimped, we saved. I got really into grocery store couponing. We made it work. 

And we never thought about mortgage forbearance again!

A check, a mystery … and a lawsuit 

That is, until a few weeks ago. At the end of March, we received a letter in the mail from something called the “Wells Fargo Forbearance Litigation Settlement Administrator.”

“I think I'm glad that you got it because I might've just ripped it up and thrown it in the trash. It looks like a scam,” said Chase.

Thankfully, I was curious and opened it. Inside was a very non-scammy looking check for nearly $500.

“It was great,” Chase said. I, of course, agreed. It was great! 

But also confusing. We hadn’t requested forbearance and never stopped making our monthly payments. So why did we get a check?

To find answers, I spoke with Julie Forrester Rogers at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law, where she’s a professor and Provost Faculty Research Fellow.

“I think it would be surprising to get a check without knowing about it. But it seems to me that they probably have correct contact information for you since you did receive the check,” said Rogers. “My guess is that you did get some sort of notice.”

(Huh. Well, to be clear … I get a lot of junk mail from Wells Fargo and have three kids. So I’m giving myself a pass on this one.)

Rogers explained that we were part of a much larger group of borrowers that ended up in a $185 million lawsuit against Wells Fargo. While she wasn’t involved in the lawsuit herself, she reviewed the entire complaint to help me break it down.

“The allegations of the lawsuit are that Wells Fargo put some of their borrowers into forbearance without their permission without them even asking or requesting a forbearance,” said Rogers.

Even just clicking a button saying you wanted more information could have landed borrowers in automatic forbearance. That’s what Rogers said probably happened to us. 

Now, here’s the thing about forbearance — even if you don’t realize it and are still making your monthly payments — being in forbearance can negatively affect your credit. That’s how the class action lawsuit got rolling. I didn’t notice, but other borrowers did.

“So they may have applied for a credit card and were denied. They may have applied for a home equity loan and were denied. They may had wanted to refinance their loan at a lower interest rate,” said Rogers. “And they were denied because of forbearance.” 

Wells Fargo agreed to settle the case last fall, without admitting any wrongdoing. More than 300,000 borrowers were affected.

“During the early stages of the pandemic, Wells Fargo worked hard to help customers who expressed concern about financial hardship and their ability to make their next mortgage payments,” said a company spokesperson in an emailed statement. “We support this settlement because we believe it is in the best interests of our customers.”

So please, if you’re a Wells Fargo mortgage customer, consider this a public service announcement: Sort through that giant stack of mail on your coffee table. And open it.