In July 2009, Roy and Sheila Bowers refinanced the mortgage on their suburban ranch home in Topeka, Kan. The couple wanted to take advantage of the low interest rates that were all the rage at the time.

Roy, a truck driver, and Sheila, a former hotel housekeeping supervisor, knew their new loan from Wells Fargo would enable them to save $198.86 a month, a nice chunk to help with gas and groceries.

But what the Bowers never imagined was that their old loan, the one Wells Fargo told them was paid off, would resurrect itself, trashing their credit report, scotching their son's student loans and throwing the whole family into foreclosure. All, they say, even though they didn't miss a single mortgage payment.

The Bowers are not alone.

More and more, homeowners say that mortgages they thought were dead and buried are springing back to life, sometimes haunting them all the way into foreclosure.

"It's the most egregious manifestation of an industry that's seriously broken," said Ira Rheingold, a lawyer who is the executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.

Diane Thompson, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, said she has defended hundreds of foreclosure cases, and in nearly all of them the homeowner was not in default.

"The record keeping on the part of the mortgage servicers is not to be trusted," Thompson said.

The problems grew from a lot of sloppy record keeping that began during the housing boom, when Wall Street built a quick-and-dirty back-office operation to process mortgages quickly so lenders could sell as many loans as possible. As the loans were later sold to investors and then resold around the world, the back-office system sidestepped crucial legal procedures.

Now it's becoming clear just how dysfunctional and, according to several state attorneys general, how fraudulent the whole system was.

Depositions from "affidavit slaves" depict a surreal, assembly-line world in which the banks and their partner firms hired hair stylists, young employees from fast-food restaurants and Wal-Mart floor workers, paying them $10 an hour, to pose as bank vice presidents, assistant secretaries and corporate attorneys.

These "robosigners" became a national sensation in the fall of 2010 when it was revealed that they faked titles, forged documents and backdated affidavits so they could make up for the bypassed procedures and foreclose on properties. They passed around notary stamps as if they were salt. They did all of this, they testified, without verifying a single word in any of the documents, as is required by law.

And it was all done, they say, to foreclose on as many homeowners as fast as possible.

No one collects statistics on wrongful foreclosures or how many people are facing phantom mortgage debts. But as the industry enters its fifth year of unwinding its mortgage morass, consumer groups, homeowner attorneys and foreclosure-fraud investigators say they are seeing more cases in which people who don't owe the banks a dime are getting ensnared in the same hell as those who have missed payments.

They add that such problems are likely to intensify. Former industry employees have testified that they knowingly pushed through foreclosures on the wrong people.

The attorney for the Bowers, the couple from Topeka, said their credit woes stem from an "Erroneous Release of Mortgage" document stating that the Bowers' first mortgage "has not been fully paid, nor satisfied, nor discharged, but, instead, continues to exist." The document was signed by a robosigner after the first mortgage had, in fact, been paid off by the new mortgage they obtained in their refinancing, they say.

It all casts a pall over a housing market in worse condition than it was during the Great Depression. By some estimates, 12.5 percent of U.S. homes with mortgages are either in foreclosure or the loans are at least 30 days past due, representing about $1 trillion in value.

"This is an epic problem that the economy hasn't even begun to digest," said Florida foreclosure analyst Lisa Epstein.

In some cases, mortgages that were supposed to die off in a refinancing are popping back up, while in others the loans were paid in full. Homeowners who pay off their houses through bankruptcy programs are also falling prey. So are homeowners who never even had a mortgage to begin with.

Homeowners say the banks' repo men sometimes show up at work. Banks also hector them with threatening letters and phone calls.