Thousands of protesters gathered outside Bank of America’s Charlotte, North Carolina headquarters throughout the day today, protesting the bank’s involvement in the financial crisis, its shady foreclosure practices, and its financing of destructive environmental projects. At least four protesters were arrested for crossing police lines during the protests, which otherwise remained largely peaceful, according to reports.

The protesters also “foreclosed” on Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium, the home of the National Football League’s Carolina Panthers and the site of the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Protesters who owned Bank of America shares were refused entry into the bank’s annual shareholder’s meeting, much as Wells Fargo protesters were at its annual meeting last week.

Inside the meeting, disgruntled shareholders forced votes on various proposals, most of which were rejected by executives. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan’s compensation package, which sextupled to more than $7.5 million despite the fact that the bank’s stock price was cut in half in 2011, was overwhelmingly approved.

View pictures of the protest, via Reuters, New Bottom Line, and organizer Matt Browner Hamlin:

North Carolina is in the news for its new ban on marriage equality, but there’s something else happening in the Tarheel state today: The Bank of America shareholders meeting is being occupied.

In the recession’s fallout, Bank of America has been a primary target, and the demonstrations at its shareholder meeting are just another in a long list of efforts to combat abusive banking practices. What are they protesting? Here’s a list of the top five reasons that Bank of America is being occupied:

1) Cruel and unusual foreclosure practices.: Bank of America’s foreclosure practices are something out of a science fiction novel. There’s the case of the woman and her disabled daughter who were foreclosed on, even after they’d received a loan modification; there are the homeowners that BofA offered loan modifications to if they erased mean things they said about the bank on Twitter; there’s the man who almost lost his home over an 80 cent typo, the elderly couple who were wrongly foreclosed on for paying their mortgage too early, and the man who had the destroyed remnants of his hurricane ravaged house foreclosed on.

2) Bank of America places Bank of America over its customers: Serious accusations leveled against Bank of America include the claim that Bank of America intentionally blocked its customers from seeking mortgage help (“The bank and its agents routinely pretended to have lost homeowners’ documents, failed to credit payments during trial modifications and intentionally misled homeowners about their eligibility for the program, the complaint alleged”), and that they allow homes to fall apart in areas that are heavily populated by people of color.

3) A ton of fees, for very little reason: Bank of America customers can expect to pay fees for just about anything. Recipients of unemployment insurance can get hit with fees simply for withdrawing their money. Similarly, taxpayers can find themselves paying a fee on withdrawing their tax returns in some states where the returns can be loaded onto pre-paid debit cards.

4) Bank of America is guilty of robo-signing: As recently as last year, Bank of America was still using robo-signing, the practice of approving foreclosures without verifying basic loan information. Instructions came from management to continue robo-signing, despite objections from lower-level staff.

5) While their customers suffer, the CEO at Bank of America is raking it in:
Less than a month ago, we reported that CEO Brian Moynihan got a $7.5 million pay package. Meanwhile, the company’s shareholders saw the stock lose more than half of its value. In fact, Moynihan’s pay quadrupled in 2011.

Activists from the 99 Percent Movement took to the streets across America to mark May Day on Tuesday, but their campaign against Wall Street is just beginning. In the month of May, activist groups and religious leaders will again turn their focus to urging customers to move their money from Wall Street banks.

Last week, religious leaders and activists targeted Wells Fargo’s annual meeting, where they protested the bank’s predatory and often discriminatory practices and its lack of accountability for its role in the financial crisis that crippled the American economy. Next week, protesters will target Bank of America’s annual meeting, attempting to call attention to the same problems. Throughout the month, a diverse group of activists will push customers to move their money from Wall Street to community banks and credit unions, according to a press release from New Bottom Line, an organizing group that has dubbed May “Move Our Money Month”:

On May 9, thousands of people associated with the 99% Power Movement — families facing foreclosure, clergy, students, seniors, environmentalists, and others — will descend on Bank of America’s shareholder meeting in Charlotte, NC to urge the bank to keep families in their homes, pay its fair share of taxes, and stop choking democracy through massive campaign contributions. If Bank of America does not enact new policies that are more responsive to the communities it serves, large numbers of customers are expected to close their accounts. [...]

“The 99 percent are making their voices heard by moving their money out of the big banks that wrecked the economy and are doing nothing to fix it. This spring, there will be more people attending bank shareholders meetings than at any point in history and we will see more people severing their relationships with the big banks in favor of smaller institutions that are responsive to community concerns,” said Ilana Berger, Co-Director of The New Bottom Line.

The 99 Percent Movement has successfully targeted Wall Street banks with “Move Your Money” campaigns since last fall, when hundreds of thousands of people switched from large banks to credit unions in October and 40,000 more joined on a single day — known as “Bank Transfer Day” — in early November. Churches and faith leaders joined the cause, targeting banks for dodging taxes and unfair mortgage practices. Churches moved $55 million from Wall Street before Thanksgiving, and San Francisco faith leaders moved another $10 million from Wells Fargo in February.

Such campaigns are expected to have profound impacts on Wall Street’s bottom lines. A Wall Street consulting firm reported in November that the nation’s 10 largest banks could lose as much as $185 billion in deposits over the next year thanks to customer defections, and Bank of America — the activists’ next target — is the most vulnerable among them. According to the report, it could lose 10 percent of its customers and $42 billion by the end of 2012.

A California woman is facing foreclosure from Bank of America after taking out a loan to make her home more accessible for her disabled daughter, shining light on yet another improper foreclosure practice perpetuated by America’s largest banks.

Dirma Rodriguez fell behind on her original loan after spending thousands of dollars installing tile floors and a wheelchair ramp to make it easier for Ingrid Ortiz, her daughter who has cerebral palsy, to move around the house. When Rodriguez fell behind on her original loan, Bank of America offered her a trial modification. Even though Rodriguez kept up with those payments for more than a year, the bank sold her home at auction, and the new owner is pursuing eviction, the Los Angeles Times reports:

Rodriguez took out a loan to retrofit her house for her special-needs daughter. After she fell behind on her payments, the Bank of America lowered her monthly obligation, but then sold the house at a foreclosure auction last September. The new owner, a house flipper from El Segundo called West Ridge Rentals, moved to evict the family. [...]

Bank of America inherited Rodriguez’s loan from Countrywide. After her payment jumped, and she fell behind, the bank placed her in a trial loan modification. She made her payments faithfully for 13 months and was awaiting a permanent modification package when the bank sold her home out from under her, she says.

Rodriguez’s story, unfortunately, is not unique. Thanks to the process known as dual-tracking, banks have thrown thousands of homeowners into foreclosure even while offering those same homeowners loan modifications. As a result, homeowners who were willing to make new, lower payments to stay in their homes are often evicted anyway. Dual tracking, along discriminatory, fraudulent, and deceptive practices, led Bank of America and other Wall Street banks to settle a $25 billion suit with the federal government last month.

Trial modifications like the one given to Rodriguez, whose loan is backed by Freddie Mac, are supposed to last three months before the terms of the modification are made permanent if all payments are made. Rodriguez says she made 13 consecutive payments, but Bank of America told the Times that it still wants to be sure she can afford the payments before it makes the modification permanent. “I don’t want a free house,” Rodriguez told the Times. “I just want to make my payments.”

Luckily for Rodriguez, local activists have taken up her cause. Occupy Fights Foreclosure helped her stave off a scheduled eviction on March 26, and the company that bought her home at auction is willing to return it if Bank of America pays it back. The bank, which set the whole process in motion, is now considering giving her a modification that would allow her to keep the home.

Bank of America’s foreclosure processes have been a wreck during the mortgage crisis — the bank has foreclosed on homes that no longer exist, used fraudulent procedures to speed through documents, and pushed borrowers into foreclosure because of small clerical errors. Now, the bank is apparently using its shoddy foreclosure practices on its credit card accounts too.

Kathy Stevens paid off nearly $2,000 in delinquent credit card debt to Bank of America in 2006. Since then, she’s been fighting collection agencies who want her to pay it off again. Bank of America allegedly sold Stevens’ account to outside collection agencies, but did not include documentation to show it had been “considered settled,” according to a lawsuit filed against the outside collectors.

Bank of America is not directly involved in the lawsuit, but it was the mega-bank’s actions that set off the case, American Banker reports:

Shortly after Stevens paid off her debt, Bank of America appears to have sold rights to her account to outside debt collectors affiliated with CACH LLC. The collectors began calling Stevens and sending her collection letters, according to Stevens’ state court filings. They demanded she pay off — with interest — the B of A card account that Plaza had assured Stevens in writing she’d covered.

“They would constantly call, they would constantly mail stuff to me,” Stevens says. Even when she sent the collectors proof of having paid her debt, “that just didn’t seem to be good enough for them. They still ended up taking me to court. The proof is in the paperwork, what more do I have to present to you?”

As American Banker notes, most of the accounts Bank of America sold off to outside collection agencies were legitimately delinquent. But similar to the robo-signing scandal that enveloped it and other banks during the mortgage crisis, the bank’s oversight failures led to the inclusion of accounts — like Stevens’ — where it had incomplete records or where the borrowers owe nothing. Stevens’ attorney said he has represented nearly 500 clients with cases similar to Stevens’, and more often than not, collections agencies fail to produce complete documentation on the accounts in question.

While much of the attention on big banks has centered on fraudulent mortgage practices, government regulators are increasing scrutiny on credit card procedures as well. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is investigating credit card practices at banks like JPMorgan Chase, and the newly-formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has vowed to investigate fraudulent and predatory credit card lending practices as well.

The Wall Street Journal noted this week that that CEO pay lagged behind profits and productivity last year, mirroring a trend that has been occurring with workers’ wages for decades. But even that slight modicum of moderation regarding executive compensation evidently didn’t extend to Bank of America, which gave CEO Brian Moynihan a $7.5 million pay package — six times as much as he made in 2010 — following a year in which the company’s stock plummeted:

Bank of America gave its CEO a pay package worth $7.5 million last year, six times as large as the year before. It happened while the company’s stock lost more than half its value and the bank lost its claim as the biggest in the country.

The package for CEO Brian Moynihan included a salary of $950,000, a $6.1 million stock award and about $420,000 worth of use of company aircraft and tax and financial advice.

For those keeping score, Bank of America’s stock dropped 58 percent in 2011 and the bank surrendered its title as the nation’s largest to JP Morgan Chase. A good chunk of the stock award was actually given to Moynihan for the bank’s 2010 performance, when it lost money.

In addition to seeing its stock tank, Bank of America has also been, according to a whistleblower suit, intentionally blocking troubled homeowners from receiving mortgage aid. The whistleblower alleges that BofA misled borrowers about their eligibility for federal mortgage aid programs and that “the bank and its agents routinely pretended to have lost homeowners’ documents.” (But remember, Bank of America will modify your mortgage as long as you erase all the mean things you’ve been saying about it on Twitter.)

BofA has also been tied up in the foreclosure fraud scandal, and just a few months ago paid $335 million to settle charges that its subsidiary discriminated against minorities in its lending. If this is how much Moynihan gets after that sort of year, what will he receive if the bank actually has a good one?

Scandal enveloped multiple Wall Street megabanks in 2010 when it was discovered that throughout the housing bust and the foreclosure crisis that ensued, the nation’s largest banks were caught robo-signing — the practice of approving foreclosures without verifying mortgage information and fabricating other loan documents. At the time, the banks promised to end the practice and attempted to escape blame by tying the scandal to low-level employees.

In reality, bank managers knew about the potentially illegal and fraudulent practices and in some cases directed them, according to a report by the inspector general of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. At Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and other banks, documents were rarely verified, and even when employees raised concerns they were told by management to proceed, the New York Times reports:

At Wells Fargo, now the nation’s largest mortgage servicer and originator, employees told the inspector general’s office that the company’s management had assigned them bogus titles, including “vice president of loan documentation,” even though they had no training in document review. Before becoming vice president, one employee worked at a pizza restaurant. [...]

As at Wells Fargo, employees at JPMorgan Chase took on titles like “vice president of Chase Home” even though “the titles were given by Chase for the sole purpose of allowing individuals to sign documents and came with no other duties or authority.”

There were other indications that management knew about the practices. At Bank of America, employees raised concerns but were told by management to proceed; Wells Fargo squashed a study into foreclosure practices and told the employee conducting the study to continue signing documents without reading or verifying data; and Citigroup management admitted that the bank regularly signed foreclosure documents without verification, even as the bank was telling regulators that internal reviews found its practices to be sound. Despite promises to stop when the scandal broke, banks continued robo-signing for at least another year.

The IG report falls in line with recent accounts provided by former Wall Street employees and whistleblowers. A Bank of America whistleblower last week said the bank had intentionally prevented homeowners from getting federal mortgage help, and a former JPMorgan employee told Reuters in November that exploiting consumers was “the purpose of the banking industry.” An investigation into 400 San Francisco-area foreclosure cases, meanwhile, found that nearly every one of them had potential legal issues.

“I believe the reports we just released will leave the reader asking one question — how could so many people have participated in this misconduct?” HUD Inspector General David Montoya said in a statement. “The answer — simple greed.”

Since the housing bubble burst, the federal government has implemented a host of programs aimed at helping Americans avoid foreclosure. So far, the results of those programs have been underwhelming.

One of the biggest disappointments has been the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). Meant to save 3-4 million homeowners from foreclosure, the program has reached just a fraction of that number, has barely spent any of the money allocated to it, and has been bogged down by bank intransigence.

Bank of America has been one of the worst banks for getting homeowners through the HAMP program. This has mostly been blamed on the bank’s incompetence, but a whistleblower suit in Colorado alleges that Bank of America was intentionally steering customers away from HAMP:

The complaint unsealed Wednesday was filed by whistleblower Gregory Mackler, a Colorado resident who said he worked alongside Bank of America executives while an employee at Urban Lending Solutions, a company to which Bank of America contracted some of its HAMP work.

While working at Urban Lending, Mackler said he saw BofA and its loan servicing subsidiary, BAC Homes Loans Servicing LP, implement “business practices designed to intentionally prevent scores of eligible homeowners from becoming eligible or staying eligible for permanent HAMP modification.”

The bank and its agents routinely pretended to have lost homeowners’ documents, failed to credit payments during trial modifications and intentionally misled homeowners about their eligibility for the program, the complaint alleged.

According to the complaint, Bank of America “let through just enough HAMP modifications to avert suspicion and allay congressional critics, while not enough to incur any substantial losses to its own bottom line.”

Back in 2009, ThinkProgress caught Bank of America violating HAMP by pushing eligible borrowers into the bank’s own, more expensive, private loan modification program. At the time, we pushed Treasury to more closely police the bank’s practices, to ensure it was complying with HAMP and providing maximum help to homeowners. If the allegations in the whistleblower case are true, that certainly didn’t happen.

Back in November, we noted how Bank of America was raking in millions of dollars in fees by contracting with states to put unemployment benefits on BofA debit cards. By using those cards, people can get hit with all manner of charges — including ATM fees — when they attempt to access their benefits. One woman estimated that she had paid $350 just to withdraw her own unemployment benefits.

And it’s not only unemployment benefits that are now being loaded onto pre-paid debit cards, giving BofA the chance to reap a profit on a public service. As Logan Smith at the Palmetto Public Record noted, BofA could also be cashing in on tax returns that have been loaded onto debit cards in South Carolina:

The state Department of Revenue announced the program back in December, but conveniently left off the long list of fees which customers without BofA accounts will be subject to.

For every withdrawal from a non-Bank of America ATM, BofA will take $2.50 off the top — in addition to any fees the ATM owner might charge. Want to get your money directly from the bank? The first time’s free, but every withdrawal after that comes with a $10 fee. Leaving the country? Bank of America takes 2% of every single transaction you make outside the United States. [...]

Bank of America didn’t have to bid for the program, according to a Department of Revenue spokesperson who told Palmetto Public Record the state chose BofA over South Carolina-based banks because “they were the best fit.”

As Smith also pointed out, BofA doesn’t even bother charging South Carolina to provide this particular service, figuring it can make its entire profit off of fees and interest. Additionally, the program is opt-out, meaning unwitting South Carolinians are automatically signed up to fork over some of their tax return to the nation’s second largest bank.

BofA already had to quickly backtrack when it proposed a monthly debit card fee, and fees are currently the number one reason that millions of Americans are moving their money out of the nation’s biggest banks.

Since the 99 Percent Movement began last fall, activists have pushed consumers to transfer their money from big banks that were at the center of the financial crisis to smaller community banks and credit unions. Thus far, their efforts have been successful. Around 200,000 moved their accounts on “Bank Transfer Day” in November (early estimates of 600,000 were revised down), and in the last 90 days, more than 5.6 million moved their accounts, with more than 600,000 citing Bank Transfer Day as the reason.

Today, to celebrate Valentine’s Day, activists in New York City will target Bank of America, citing the bank’s shoddy consumer record regarding its mortgage lending practices and its support for hazardous environmental practices like mountaintop removal coal mining, according to a press release published at the Paramus Post:

Bank of America loves profits more than people. We, the 99%, want out of this abusive relationship. Bank of America has foreclosed on more homes than any other bank in the United States. On February 14th, Valentine’s Day, housing and environmental activists will break up with Bank of America.

According to the release, activists organized by Mountain Justice, an environmental group, and various groups associated with Occupy Wall Street will gather at New York’s Washington Square this afternoon before marching to a local Bank of America branch and delivering thousands of blue valentines. Bank of America is a “grave threat to US financial stability,” the release says, and it also has “an ugly relationship with the planet: bankrupting the ecosystem with their investments in the coal industry–lending billions of dollars to companies seeking to build new coal-fired power plants.”

Bank of America has been the target of protests over its financial and foreclosure practices, ranging from charging customers fees to withdraw unemployment benefits, foreclosing on homes because of clerical errors, and perpetuating fraudulent foreclosure practices. The bank, meanwhile, has been targeted repeatedly by environmental activists for its connections to Big Coal.

According to one consulting firm, Bank of America is the most susceptible bank to bank transfer protests and could lose up to 10 percent of its customers and $42 billion in customer deposits.