Wells Fargo is (somewhat) exonerated. After 9+ weeks, we received a response to the email (email only, no calls taken) sent to the Wells Fargo unclaimed property office. There WAS a record of my friend at Wachovia/Wells Fargo...which we knew all along.
After his appointment with the local branch manager a month ago, her son received a call supposedly from the unclaimed property office. The rep told him there was no record of his mother at Wachovia/Wells Fargo.
Now, the unclaimed property rep (via email) told us he HAD one 2010 1099-INT for the CD that was not the Burial Reserve CD account. We didn't have her 2010 tax returns so I did not have this information. This piece of information told me the Burial Reserve CD would have had to have been transferred in 2009.
I called the bank to which the Burial Reserve monies might have been transferred since I now had a window of time to search. I also had the information from my friend's hand-written note that the balance of the burial CD was about $12,000. The bank is a smaller bank and I had talked to this rep multiple times helping my friend's son receive funds due him. Thankfully, she was willing to work with me over the phone.
I asked her if she could look in the system for an incoming transfer of approximately $12,000 in 2009. She said "Hang on a minute while I do a search." She was able to immediately search under my friend's SSN and she found a $12,000 incoming transfer in Feb 2009. Bingo! There was no 2009 1099-INT for the $12,000 CD my friend purchased because it was set up to credit interest annually. The interest didn't show up until her 2010 taxes (which I did not have).
So, the end of the story (at least what I can piece together with the info available) is that the $3,000 she deposited into a CD in 1991 was transferred out of Wachovia (the name did not change until 2011 come to find out) in 2009 into another bank and placed into CD that lost the burial reserve designation.
I emailed with the unclaimed property guy who found the 2010 1099-INT and asked him why no one else was able to find this document. "Oh, no one ever knows the right place to look!" Aaaaaaaaaaargh!!!!!
So, Wells Fargo is exonerated in that nothing nefarious happened to the $12,000. What is not exonerated is their utter incompetence!