Chase admits to overcharging, wrongly foreclosing on military families

Well here's something that won't help the big banks polish their increasingly tarnished reputations: JP Morgan Chase, the country's second-largest bank, admitted to NBC that it has "overcharged several thousand military families for their mortgages, including families of troops fighting in Afghanistan." The bank also confessed that it improperly foreclosed on the homes of several military families.

NBC's Lisa Myers and Sarah Heidarpour report that the bank repeatedly violated the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, a law that makes it illegal to set mortgage interest rates higher than 6 percent for active-duty troops. The 2003 law was established to "ensure that service members protecting our country do not suffer the added burden of worrying about the loss of a home," according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development's website.

Marine Capt. Jonathan Rowles and his wife, Julia, sued the bank after years of overcharge fights beginning in 2006. The couple's records show that while they made timely mortgage payments at 6 percent interest, the bank charged them 3 or 4 percentage points more, causing their mortgage to wrongly accumulate thousands in late fees.

Capt. Rowles said he'd get multiple calls a day from the bank's debt collectors while he was on active duty, often in the wee hours of the morning when he was trying to sleep.

"It's been a nightmare. It's been my living nightmare," Julia Rowles told NBC. "Saturday, Sundays, middle of the night. It did not matter if it was a holiday."

A Chase spokeswoman told NBC News that "we feel particularly badly about the mistakes we made" with mortgages for troops -- about 4,000 of them, including foreclosures on 14 military families. The bank will mail over $2 million in refunds, she said, and most of the wrongly foreclosed-on families will be restored to their homes or have been already. The company is "deeply appreciative of those who fight to protect our country," she added.

You can watch NBC's report on Chase's misdeeds below:

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(Photo: AP)