Two thefts decades apart, and a victim's quest for answers

Mike Ambrosi

After weeks of fruitless phone calls and futile visits to the bank, Rosemarie Brekke was fed up.

She walked into the Bank of America branch in downtown San Rafael, California — across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco — and joined one of the teller lines. It was a Friday afternoon in February 2018, and the branch was busy.

When Brekke got to the window, she angled her body so that the other customers could hear the exasperation in her voice as she spoke to the teller. Then she explained her predicament.

Four and a half months earlier, Brekke had visited this same BofA branch to open a savings account. At the time, the 70-year-old widow needed a banking relationship that would allow her to accept a payment from Austria — the country that her Jewish mother had fled as a refugee in 1938.

Brekke opened an account, and she later received a $45,496.57 payment from the Austria-based General Settlement Fund for Victims of National Socialism. She planned to keep the reparations money at BofA while she worked to settle her late mother's estate.

Now, on a cloudy February afternoon, Brekke was back inside the BofA branch on 4th Street in San Rafael, facing a nightmare scenario: The bank had taken more than half of the reparations money from her account.

Over the last few weeks, she'd spent many hours trying to get Bank of America to resolve the situation, but she'd gotten nowhere. Since patience wasn't working, Brekke figured she needed to grab folks' attention. Even if she risked sounding like a crazy person.

"The money was stolen by the Nazis first. And Bank of America is now the corporate thief that stole it again!" Brekke exclaimed.

This is the story of a woman who was victimized twice — once through events that occurred across the Atlantic Ocean before she was born, and a second time through a case of identity fraud in modern-day California.

Brekke is an inveterate record-keeper, and she provided many documents that support the account she shared in multiple interviews.

Together, the interviews and documents provide an unusually detailed picture of a bank's mishandling of a fraud case, and how it intersected with the victim's quest to unearth her family's hidden past.

Brekke's story offers a vivid illustration of what is being lost with the steady decline of relationship banking in the United States. At a smaller, locally owned bank, it's easy to imagine that her dispute might have been resolved quickly. At the nation's second-largest bank, Brekke interacted with branch workers who seemingly wanted to make things right but weren't empowered to do so.

Naomi Patton, a Bank of America spokesperson, did not answer numerous written questions about the situation, citing client confidentiality and saying that a BofA client team had been unable to determine certain information about events that occurred more than six years ago.

Patton did not dispute a detailed chronology of Brekke's case that American Banker provided to the bank.

Susan Read

A dark, hidden history

Brekke was reared in the South in the 1950s and 1960s by a mother who avoided talking about her past. After college, she worked as a high-school math teacher in Charleston, South Carolina.

Her ticket to the wider world was a job as a Pan Am flight attendant. In 1977, two years after she got married, she and her husband bought a ranch-style house in San Rafael. They raised their two daughters there. Brekke still lives in that home today.

Her battle to recover more than $27,000 from Bank of America was preceded by an even more arduous effort to recoup what was rightfully hers. That yearslong struggle was not about money, she says. It was about reclaiming her family's history.

"The money that came into BofA was pennies on the dollar. And I knew that was going to be the case," she explained.

Brekke's maternal grandfather was an Austrian librettist named Julius Brammer. He wrote the lyrics for operettas, which were a popular form of entertainment in Austria during the early 20th century.

Brammer's many credits include "Countess Maritza," which was adapted for multiple films after its stage premiere in 1924. That same year, Brammer's wife, Rose Marie, gave birth to their daughter Ilse.

The Brammers had full lives in a city rich with culture. And they were prosperous. Their assets included part ownership of a theater in Vienna, real estate in Berlin and a villa in the picturesque Austrian hot-springs town of Bad Ischl.

In 1938, the Nazis invaded Vienna. Germany's annexation of Austria — known as the Anschluss — had the support of many Austrian citizens. It immediately sparked widespread persecution of Jews.

The Nazis' arrival split the Brammer family apart. Julius, Rose Marie and Ilse fled — first to Switzerland and soon after to France. But three of Julius' sisters, who had lived with the Brammers in Vienna and helped to raise Ilse, stayed behind.

In France, 14-year-old Ilse did not continue her schooling. Toward the end of World War II, she met an American soldier, Grier Kester, who was stationed in France. They got married, and Ilse, who went by the nickname Lisette, started a new life in her husband's home state of South Carolina.

Brekke, the oldest of the couple's three children, was raised in Columbia, South Carolina. The family did not have a lot of money. Brekke recalled that whenever her mom was asked about her life in Europe, she responded: "All of that is history to me."

Still, Brekke kept trying. She asked her mother whether she was Jewish. Her mom denied it, insisting that she was Catholic. Brekke eventually learned that at around age 18, during World War II in France, Lisette had been baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church, as her parents sought to protect her from the Holocaust.

In 2002, Brekke's father died. One of his last requests of his daughter was that she ask her mother about the war. Brekke tried again. Her mom still refused to discuss her past. But Brekke started researching her family's history, and she learned about a process underway in Austria to pay restitution to victims of the Nazis.

Brekke called Randy Schoenberg, a Los Angeles lawyer who had emerged as an advocate for Jewish families whose property was stolen during the war.

At the time, Schoenberg was representing Maria Altmann, a Jewish refugee from Vienna who had eventually settled in California, as she sought to recover a Gustav Klimt masterpiece that belonged to her family. That ultimately successful legal battle was later dramatized in the 2015 film "Woman in Gold."

Schoenberg advised Brekke on how to track down records in Austria, and on how to navigate the various processes that had been set up to compensate victims. Claims could be filed for different categories of assets, including bank accounts, investments, insurance policies, education losses, liquidated businesses, real property and moveable property such as art, household valuables and cars.

Brekke threw herself into the tedious process. She obtained key family records from Austrian archives and got some of them translated from German.

As part of her quest, Brekke set out to find three pieces of artwork that had gone missing. She sent letters to museums around the world. But she never managed to locate the art. Nor was she able to track down various watches and pieces of jewelry that had belonged to her grandparents.

"A lot of the things I did were a long shot," Brekke said. "Every crumb that someone threw my way during that time, I did follow up on."

Brekke's mother refused to participate in the historical excavation project. But in 2004, Brekke was able to secure for her mom a small pension from the Austrian government — compensation for the fact that Lisette was denied even a high school education.

Years passed by. When Brekke's husband, Gary, was diagnosed with kidney cancer, she put her historical research to the side. But after Gary Brekke died in 2007, Rosemarie resumed the project of reclaiming her family's past.

Eventually, she traveled to Austria. She saw an outdoor performance of "Countess Maritza" and took the train to Bad Ischl, where she found the villa that once belonged to her grandparents.

In 2013, Lisette Kester died. But shortly before she passed away, she posed a question to her daughter, who'd been researching their family's history for more than a decade. Lisette wanted to know what had happened to her three aunts who had stayed in Austria. "They loved Vienna, and they didn't want to leave," Brekke recalled her mom saying.

Brekke shared what she had found in her research: All three aunts had died either en route to Auschwitz or inside the death camp. Lisette replied, "At least I don't have to live the rest of my life wondering what happened to them."

Brekke's mother had always claimed that she was from a small family. "She really was from a big family," Brekke said in a recent interview. "They just didn't survive the war."

The year after her mother passed away, Brekke's application for reparations was approved. "I exhausted myself for 11 years trying to get to the bottom of different things," she said. "I pursued everything."

Still, there were unanswered questions, and Brekke's continuing search for answers delayed the payment from Austria. Finally in September 2017, the General Settlement Fund for Victims of National Socialism sent Brekke a letter explaining that it would be making a payment to settle her mother's claims.

Those claims were calculated to be worth around $389,000, but because the value of valid claims far exceeded the money available, they were paid on a proportional basis. The letter sent to Brekke said that she should expect to receive a transfer of $45,496.57, or about 12 cents on the dollar.

To receive the money, Brekke needed an account at a bank that had a SWIFT code. So she went to the Bank of America branch in downtown San Rafael to inquire about a savings account.

Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

"I opened that account," Brekke recalled, "and explained to them the significance, and asked them to notify me when the money came in from Europe." In November, the funds arrived from Austria. Additional money that Brekke deposited brought the balance to more than $70,000.

Detective work

Two months later, Brekke received an unexpected letter in the mail from Bank of America. It threw her for a loop.

The January 2018 letter was sent to her correct address in San Rafael, but her name was spelled wrong. Brekke's full name is Rosemarie Elizabeth Brekke. The correct spelling appeared on her BofA savings account. Oddly, though, this letter was addressed to Rose M. Brekke.

The unsigned letter claimed that Brekke had a business account at BofA, which was false. It further stated that the account, which would turn out to be a business credit card, was past due; that the bank had been unsuccessful in its efforts to recover the debt; and that the account had been charged off.

"We've also exercised our right to deduct the amount of the debt from your deposit account and apply it to your business account," the letter stated.

And with that, $27,169.80 was gone from Brekke's savings account. It amounted to about 60% of the funds that she'd fought so long to collect from Austria. The letter advised Brekke to call a toll-free number if she had questions. She did so, anticipating that the bank would acknowledge its error.

"I just figured on Monday they would say, 'Oh my God, we made a mistake. Oh, we're really sorry,'" she said.

But she was unable to get the situation resolved.

A short time later, Brekke returned to the BofA branch on 4th Street in San Rafael. A branch employee called BofA's fraud department and was told that in August 2016, Brekke had opened a small-business credit card that had a $27,000 credit limit.

Brekke continued to search for answers. Over the next week or so, she called various Bank of America phone numbers but got stuck in a special kind of customer-service hell. She recalls being placed on hold for long stretches, getting disconnected mysteriously and being falsely accused of wrongdoing.

Brekke was experiencing headaches and insomnia. Her stress was magnified by the fact that she was responsible for her late mother's estate. She became a regular visitor to BofA branches, spending hours waiting while an employee tried to get the right person on the phone. She brought along work to make use of the time.

Finally, during one call to the fraud department, came a bit of a breakthrough. The woman on the other end of the line initially admonished Brekke, saying that the credit card debt was hers, and advised her to stop trying to get the money back. Brekke replied that the bank had never notified her of the debt, and she asked if monthly bills had been sent out. The BofA representative said that the bills had indeed been sent to her at an address on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.

"I said, 'I don't live on Wilshire Boulevard. I've lived in the same house and had the same address since 1977,'" Brekke recalled.

Brekke requested copies of the credit card statements, which arrived a short time later. The bills contained some clues.

The name on the credit card account was Rose M. Brekke, along with the name of an apparently fictitious LLC. The address was a building on Wilshire, near the edge of LA's Koreatown neighborhood, that housed a business where mailboxes were available for rent.

Kevin Wack

The transactions on the statement dated to August 2016, or about a year before Brekke opened her BofA savings account. There was a $26,500 charge to a bail bonds company, as well as a $110 payment to Costco, among other smaller purchases.

Brekke, a longtime Costco member, knew what to do next. She walked into a local Costco store, provided her Costco ID card and asked for help.

A short time later, a Costco staffer pulled up information about an account that had been paid for with the fraudulent credit card. The account listed the names of a Los Angeles-area woman and man, and it also included the woman's photograph. Their address matched up with the location of a second Southern California store that rented mailboxes — this one in the city of Burbank.

Red flags missed

Identity fraud, in which criminals use a stolen identity to commit fraud, is a common problem. Last year, losses from traditional identity fraud totaled $23 billion, according to an April report by Javelin Strategy & Research.

The study also found that the average out-of-pocket expenses for victims increased by 70% last year to $202, and that the average amount of time that consumers spent resolving issues stemming from identity fraud rose from around six hours in 2022 to nearly 10 hours last year.

"Consumers rely on their financial institutions to be trustworthy and highly knowledgeable resources when it comes to resolving identity fraud," Suzanne Sando, the Javelin report's author, said in a press release. "There are certainly areas where the fraud resolution process could be drastically improved, especially given the uptick in the average out-of-pocket expenses victims incurred while resolving identity fraud."

When Brekke tried to share what she'd learned from Costco with Bank of America, she was told that the bank didn't want the information. BofA would conduct its own investigation, which would take 90 to 150 days, she recalls being told.

The contrast with the swift actions of the Costco worker was stark. "He made it so easy, and BofA made it seem so difficult," she said.

Brekke reported the fraud to the San Rafael Police Department, and the matter was later referred to the Los Angeles Police Department. Records show that the LAPD produced an investigative report, but the authorities never informed Brekke that any arrests were made.

American Banker sought comment from the two individuals whose names were listed on the Costco account, but did not receive responses. Their names are being withheld because no evidence could be found that criminal charges were filed against them.

Brekke continued to do detective work. She obtained her Experian credit report, which showed a hard credit inquiry in July 2016 by Capital One Financial. Unlike Bank of America, which approved an account for Rose M. Brekke around the same time, Capital One rejected the application.

After Brekke followed up with Capital One, the McLean, Virginia-based company sent her a letter stating that a credit card application it received on July 27, 2016, used her name and Social Security number, and listed an address in Los Angeles.

"We have confirmed the application as fraud and canceled it," the letter stated.

One mystery about Brekke's case is why Bank of America did not flag the 2016 credit card application as fraudulent, especially in light of the fact that another lender saw red flags. Bank of America's spokesperson did not answer several questions that could offer clues about how it happened.

Those questions include: What personally identifiable information did the credit card applicant provide? Did BofA run a credit inquiry? What procedures did BofA have in place in 2016 to identify new account fraud? What personally identifying information did BofA later use to connect the fraudulent credit card account to Brekke's savings account at BofA?

Bank of America was unable to determine the answer to another key question — whether the fraudulent 2016 credit card application was submitted online or in person — according to Patton, the bank's spokesperson.

Patton said that identity thieves are sophisticated, and that figuring out how they pulled off a scam can be difficult. "It's a challenge in the industry," she said.

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The Federal Trade Commission's website lists several common red flags indicating the possibility of identity theft. Those warning signs include listing an address that doesn't match the credit report and inconsistencies in the information that the applicant provides to the lender.

The credit card that caused Brekke's ordeal was not under her real name, and it listed an address that differed from the one where she had lived for decades. Additional scrutiny by the bank could have shown that the Wilshire Boulevard address was a post office box.

At the time the credit card was opened, Brekke was an existing BofA customer. Though she had not yet opened the savings account, she'd long had a mortgage with the bank, and that account listed her correct name and address.

The methods that financial institutions use to detect identity fraud have advanced significantly since 2016. Still, experts were puzzled by Bank of America's decision to approve this particular credit card application.

"It is kind of surprising that the bank didn't have better authentication in place," said Tracy Kitten, director of fraud and security at Javelin.

Richard Tsai, head of markets and product marketing for global fraud solutions at TransUnion, agreed. "I'm not sure what was done here," he said, "but it does seem like there were a number of things that were missed in this opening process."

The breaking point

Brekke decided to make a scene at a Bank of America branch after the bank's representatives told her that they were not interested in the sleuthing she had done on the fraudulently obtained Costco account. She was also harboring doubts about BofA's promise that it would conduct its own investigation.

After Brekke entered the downtown San Rafael branch and invoked the Nazis' theft of her family's assets, which drew the attention of other BofA customers, the teller went to find a security guard.

"I don't think she knew what to do with me," Brekke recalled. "So it gave me enough time that when people migrated over to me, she wasn't right there in front of me. And so people were saying, 'Did that really happen?' I mean, it really did happen. 'It happened to me, it could happen to you.'

"I said to all the people that were looking at me, 'Your money is not safe here, you really should be careful because your money is not safe.'"

A short time later, another BofA branch employee who knew Brekke and had previously tried to help her to recoup the money sought to de-escalate the situation. He asked her if they could deal with the matter later. "No, later is now," Brekke recalls saying.

She walked out of the branch that day with two cashier's checks totaling $43,000. About four weeks later, a final check for more than $27,000 arrived in the mail, which made Brekke whole.

After being asked to provide comment for this article, BofA said in a written statement: "Bank of America follows industry-standard credit card application reviews and processes. The bank honored Ms. Brekke's claim following an investigation of her claim."

The Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank did not explain why it ultimately decided to honor the claim.

As Brekke's story shows, there exists a chasm between the often impersonal experience of doing business with a megabank and the deeply personal nature of certain financial transactions.

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Brekke, who's now 76, spoke recently about the lifelong harm that the Nazis inflicted on her mother.

"I never felt she had a real full life because of what happened to her over there," she said. "My mom tried to fit in when she came to this country. Refugees weren't welcome," she said. "And she made it her business to learn the language. But she carried with her — I think it was a paranoia about a lot of things, and about people."

While her mother was still alive, Brekke asked her if the two of them could visit Europe together.

"I said, 'It would be great for me to experience Vienna with you, because that's where you were raised,'" Brekke recalled. "She just couldn't, wouldn't and didn't."

The process of applying for reparations may have been a way for Brekke to connect with her family's past at a time when her mother couldn't engage on the topic.

But she had also hoped the funds would improve her mother's material circumstances. Throughout many decades living in the United States, her mom never had much money.

"It was really for her, and I had hoped that the money would come in while she was alive so she could enjoy it," Brekke said.

The funds ultimately arrived too late to help her mom. But the money still holds meaning to Brekke, which may explain why her outrage at Bank of America is undiminished more than six years after much of the cash disappeared from her savings account, even though the bank did eventually return her money.

"The $45,000 was a symbol," she said. "It was just an acknowledgment, a token of an acknowledgment on a global scale."