The bank swore it held the note in 2017 - so what about the 2024 lost-note affidavit
An Ohio appeals court has rejected a homeowner's years-long push to void her Wells Fargo foreclosure over allegedly false statements about her note.
The decision, issued August 10, 2026, is a useful marker for loan servicers and foreclosure teams - on a recurring problem: a lost-note affidavit that surfaces after a lender swore it held the paper.
The story starts in May 2017. Wells Fargo sued to foreclose on a home in Novelty, Ohio, saying the borrower had defaulted on a promissory note secured by a mortgage. It sought judgment on the note for $851,858.49, plus interest at 2.8% per annum.
From there, the case ran a familiar course. The homeowner moved to dismiss; the court said no. Wells Fargo moved for summary judgment in January 2018. She did not respond. In July 2018, the court granted the motion and entered the foreclosure decree - and she did not appeal it.
That silence mattered later. She returned to court repeatedly. Her strongest attempt came in December 2025, when she asked the court to throw out the judgment as "void," arguing the bank had won through "a pattern of fraud upon [the trial court]."
Her case hung on a timeline. Since 2017, Wells Fargo told the court it held the original note. But in a September 2024 "Form of Lost Note Affidavit" filed in her bankruptcy, a senior officer of the bank's assignee swore the "original note has either been lost, misfiled, misplaced or destroyed." To her, that gap proved the earlier statements false.
Both courts disagreed. The trial judge called the motion her "latest delay tactic" and "a repeat of prior claims." The appeals court affirmed, and its reasoning matters.
First, the court said the statements she attacked were not made by an officer of the court. Three appeared in pleadings counsel filed for the client; the fourth came from a corporate representative of the assignee. That kept the claim out of the narrow "fraud upon the court" exception and inside ordinary fraud, which carries a one-year deadline she had missed.
Second - the line servicers will care about - the court found no contradiction. Standing is judged when the complaint is filed. A note reported lost in 2024 need not have been lost in 2017 or 2018. The note, the court said, may have been "lost after January 2018."
The takeaway: a later lost-note affidavit does not, by itself, unwind a foreclosure won years earlier, and a borrower who skips the direct appeal cannot use a fraud theory to relitigate the merits later.
