As millions of Americans struggle in foreclosure with little hope of relief, big banks are going to borrowers who are not even in default and cutting their debt or easing the mortgage terms, sometimes with no questions asked, according to the lead front page article in the Sunday edition of The New York Times by David Streitfeld.

"Two of the nation's biggest lenders, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, are quietly modifying loans for tens of thousands of borrowers who have not asked for help but whom the banks deem to be at special risk," the article said.

The article said that Rula Giosmas, who lives in Miami, is one of the beneficiaries and that last year she received a letter from Chase saying it was cutting in half the amount she owed on her condominium. She was not in default on her $300,000 loan.

"Banks are proactively overhauling loans for borrowers like Ms. Giosmas who have so-called pay option adjustable rate mortgages, which were popular in the wild late stages of the housing boom but which banks now view as potentially troublesome," the article said.

Before Chase shaved $150,000 off her mortgage, the article said that Ms. Giosmas owed much more on her place than it was worth, a fate she shared with a quarter of all homeowners with mortgages across the nation.

"Being underwater, as it is called," the article continued, "can prevent these owners from moving and taking new jobs, and places the households at greater risk of foreclosure. 'It's a huge problem,' said the economist Sam Khater. 'Reducing negative equity would spark a housing recovery.'"

"Option ARM loans like Ms. Giosmas's gave borrowers the option of skipping the principal payment and some of the interest payment for an introductory period of several years. The unpaid balances would be added to the body of the loan. Bank of America and Chase inherited their portfolios of option ARMs when they bought troubled lenders during the housing crash. Chase, which declined to comment on its program, got $50 billion in option ARM loans when it bought Washington Mutual in 2008. The lender, which said last fall that it had dealt with 22,000 option ARM loans with an unpaid principal balance of $8 billion, still has $33 billion of them in its portfolio. Bank of America acquired a portfolio of 550,000 option ARMs from its purchase of Countrywide Financial in 2008. The lender said more than 200,000 had been converted to more stable mortgages," the article said.

"'Nightmare Mortgages' they were called in a 2006 BusinessWeek cover piece. Option ARMs were never quite as bad as predicted, partly because the crisis pushed down interest rates so far that the resets were relatively mild. Many owners did default on them, but others, like Ms. Giosmas, were quite happy to pay less for years than they would have under a conventional loan. She used option ARMs on her investment properties too," the article said.

The concern the banks are showing for those who might get in trouble contrasts sharply with their efforts toward those already foreclosed, the article continued, adding that the Bank of America and Chase were penalized last month by regulators for doing a poor job modifying mortgages in default.

Adam J. Levitin, a Georgetown University law professor, told The Times that these little-publicized programs were more evidence that the banks were behaving in contradictory and often maddening ways: "Loan modifications that should be happening aren't, while loan modifications that shouldn't be happening are."

A commenter on the article at nytimes.com, Anabelle Rothschild of Santa Monica "whenever there is a 'reduction' of principle (reduced to anything less than the amount owed) in such a transaction as a loan 'modification' there is a reality called a 'deficiency balance,'" adding that "a deficiency balance is a debt both reported to the IRS (thus a tax liability may exist) and probably to a collection agency (a debt for which they can hound you for 20 years)."