Oh they understood them well. The banks to this day continue to lie and cheat in the foreclosure process. They are allowed to get away with blatant lies every single day. I'm intimately familiar having fought Chase early on in their claim that they bought all WAMU's loans. If you read the purchase agreement they expressly did not purchase bad WAMU loans yet they continue to foreclose on them to this day, particularly no that the market has turned around. The FDIC was complicit in WAMU and other banks being taken over during the financial crisis. Thats why no one went to jail.
The public didn't understand what was going on, so there was no mass call for action.
In this case thousands of lowly Wells employees were fired for management greed and people were charged fees for accounts they never opened. That's something that the public demands action for.