Patricia McIntosh, 46, said she would have jumped at aid to avoid the foreclosure on her home in Lynn, Mass., but never got notice of the review. “When you go through a foreclosure, you are sifting through so much junk mail and scams,” Ms. McIntosh said, “so I keep my eyes open and I never got anything.”

Ms. McIntosh said she believed she was eligible for relief after U.S. Bank foreclosed on her home in the midst of a loan modification.

Christine Lucier, 32, of Northbridge, Mass., is also in limbo, unsure of what aid she may receive now that the settlement will be widely disbursed. Of the $8.5 billion settlement, $3.3 billion will be shared among the 3.8 million borrowers, and the rest comes mostly from banks’ lowering of interest payments or loan amounts for homeowners. In March 2012, Ms. Lucier received a letter from Bank of America notifying her that she was behind on her mortgage payments and in foreclosure. She thought she was having a nightmare, because the bank had evicted her in 2008.

She learned the bank had inexplicably reversed her foreclosure in November 2010. Since then, the two-bedroom colonial house had been looted by vandals and stripped of its wiring and copper piping. “My life has been turned upside down and I have to go through foreclosure again,” Ms. Lucier said.

Now that the foreclosure review has been shut down, no one will know whether examples like Ms. Lucier are anomalies. Bank executives thought that the review would prove that, while their foreclosure procedures had deficiencies, they did not result in the widespread wrongful eviction of homeowners. And housing advocates thought that the examination would prove extensive wrongdoing by the banks.

As of this week, the comptroller’s office said that it had identified 654,000 potentially problematic foreclosures — a combination of 495,000 claims submitted by borrowers and 159,000 files that the consultants flagged for review. The regulator said it was still determining the number of reviews completed, but the consultants said that only a third of the loans were fully reviewed.

A critical flaw from the start was that the federal government farmed out the work of scouring the millions of foreclosures to several consulting firms that charged as much as $250 an hour and outsourced work to contract employees, many of whom had no experience reviewing mortgages, according to the reviewers, regulators and bankers.