From my understanding this was a programming error on their part, they were informed of the problem while they still backup files of the days in question, and for the majority of the shards there was only a short period of time that elapsed with Origin being the exception. It also sounded like they were going to go back to the backups and confirm that you had those pieces of rubble in the house and not just give everyone that submitted a list something.
As far as EA giving the old owner your account back to them, that has been happening eversince I've played. Usually at least once or twice a year someone makes a post about it happening to them, and it's almost always pointed out that unless you do the account transfer there is always a risk of this happening since from what i've been told is all the need is the original codes or credit card info used when the account was opened, and by using the account transfer it wipes out that info as well as any marks against the account. Of course the last couple of times this was suggested, there was a couple posts about the number of hoops they had to jump through before finally talking to someone that actually knew what it was.
