Linda Coombs was desperate to find a way to pay her bills with her baby in the ICU. She prayed to God for help. She thought God had answered her prayers when she read the letter from Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo wrote that she was pre-qualified for the federal government loan modification program recently passed into law.

"It sounded like an answer to our prayers when we were at a lowest point in our life," Linda Coombs said.

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The Coombses, who have four children, were a month behind in their mortgage payment, so they jumped at the offer to cut their monthly bill from about $766 to $233. Under the federal government's Home Affordable Modification Program, eligible borrowers receive trial mortgage modifications in which payments are reduced to 31 percent of their income, according to the Congressional Oversight Panel. After three months of successful payments, participants are told, the modification is converted to "permanent" status for five or more years. As instructed by Wells Fargo, Linda Coombs said, she began paying $233 a month in September. That continued for three months, she said, until Wells Fargo sent a notice saying the family owed more than $3,000 in back payments.

Wells Fargo never apparently never intended to approve the Coombs. They saw an opportunity to collect thousands of dollars of fees. Wells Fargo now says that her husband, a carpenter, doesn't make enough money to be approved. However, they must have known about his income when he applied for the modification. Wells Fargo is threatening foreclosure, requesting payement of the full amount of the mortgage plus thousands of dollars of legal and late payment fees.

Thousands of other people have been given similar offers then foreclosed on by Wells Fargo. A class action lawsuit has been filed in Boston based on a very similar case. Moreover, there is strong evidence of predatory lending by Wells Fargo in Tennessee.

In Tennessee, Wells Fargo preyed on African Americans according to a lawsuit filed in April.

The complaint against Wells Fargo says the company would identify possible customers through their purchases of furniture and jewelry at businesses in African-American areas of the city and county, as well as those who previously had loans with the company. Credit managers in branch offices were instructed to contact these "leads" to persuade them to apply for new subprime loans with Wells Fargo, according to the lawsuit. "The way we were told to sell these loans was to explain that we were eliminating the customers' old debt by consolidating their existing debts into one new one," said Dancy, who worked as a credit manager in Wells Fargo's Park Avenue office from 2007 to 2008, in a declaration filed with the court. "This was not really true. We were actually just giving them a new, more expensive loan that put their house at risk." "The prevailing attitude was that African-American customers weren't savvy enough to know they were getting a bad loan, so we would have a better chance of convincing them to apply for a high-cost, subprime loan," Taylor said in a declaration filed with the court.

Linda Coombs isn't bitter. She thanks God that her baby is doing well, making a full recovery, but she's fighting to her family from homelessness. She has contacted an attorney who is interested in starting a class action suit in North Carolina.

The federal government needs to investigate indict and try the executives behind these corporate crimes against average Americans. The mortgage loan modification program has been turned into a marketing opportunity for fraud. Wells Fargo will continue to prey on families of injured babies until their crimes stop paying.