Bank Of America Says Dead Woman Must Tell Them She is Dead

I love to hate these stories, but it seems there's so many examples of company's "customer service" that gets so bureaucratic, out of whack, stupid and totally insane that there must be a competition among these companies on who can be most outrageous with customers.

A strong contender is Bank of America. A college kid's mom died, and it was up to him to tell mom's mortgage holder, that she was deceased and thus no longer able to pay the mortgage, and since he couldn't find the mortgage documents could they help?
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Could Bank of America help? Oh, that kid's a riot, isn't he?
 
Bank officials kept telling the kid, named Matt, that his dead mom would have to tell the bank she was dead before things could get straightened out, according to Consumerist. 

The kid, Matt was his name, thought sending Bank of America a copy of his mom's death certificate would straighten everything up. Boy is Matt naive! He actually thought doing something that made perfect sense would work! Ha!

Actually, according to Consumerist, he kept sending copies of the death certificate, but Bank of America kept losing them. Or so they said. I think they just threw them out, just to mess with the kid's head.

Even after they acknowledged they got the death certificate, on the fourth try, the bank told Matt his mom would still have to talk to them before the mortgage questions could be sorted out.

They also sent the account to collections to start harassing him to pay up until a sympathetic lawyer got him a ceast and desist order.

Last we heard, this case is still uresolved.

How could a bank, which is supposed to be full of smart people who really know how to manage money, be like this?  Do people just sit around and do nothing? Or do they feel like they have power, and can toy with this kid like a cat who's caught a mouse and is keeping it alive for awhile as a plaything before killing it?

I always hear stories like Matt and the Bank of America. Only bad publicity seems to fix things. I guess institutions play this game because they can.

It's not like everyone is like this. Matt said he had to settle things with his mom's other creditors, who ranged from OK, to, in the case of Chase and Capital One, quite helpful.  So it's not impossible to be, well, not impossible.

If everything the Consumerist said is true, I  hope the people at Bank of America who messed with this kid who was trying to mourn his mother are proud of themselves. Because nobody else is.