If you don’t make your payments, they can take your bank

June 8, 2011 Chad Bolender Leave a Comment

A story about a Florida bank being foreclosed on by a homeowner has recently gone viral. Noah Seidenberg of The Evanstonian has a good summary of this crazy turn of events:

So here’s what happened. A couple in Naples, Florida bought a home with cash (no mortgage) in 2009. In 2010, Bank of America began foreclosure proceedings against them. This was Bank of America’s mistake, of course. This couple, the Nyerges, hired an attorney to help defend them against this foreclosure, and then Bank of America realized their mistake and dropped it. Well, it’s great that it’s been dropped, but the Nyerges are out $2,534 in legal fees. So they’ve requested that Bank of America cover the cost multiple times over the phone and in writing. They finally get a judge to order that Bank of America pay the fees. When they still haven’t gotten their check after five months of more calls and letters, they obtained an order of foreclosure against the bank.

Read the whole thing here.

While this has been reported in the news, Social Media has really run wild with the story. Using Newsdesk 4, I plotted out the mention of Bank of America and foreclosures (in their various permutations). You can see the huge spike of blog posts vs traditional news coverage.

For the last 30 days, Social Media and News coverage have been trending together rather evenly. For this story, however, blogs blew the news sites out of the water.

A lot of people are chasing after the nature of what makes a story viral. In this case it seems rather clear that the populist angle in this story is appealing. It is human nature to celebrate the little guy winning over the big guy.

Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Filed under: media analysis,media monitoring,Newsdesk,social media,Web trends

Tags: bank of america, foreclosure