Brooklyn A Saves Client's Home from Foreclosure Rescue Scam

Waver Brickhouse came to Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation A (Brooklyn A) after losing her home in a foreclosure rescue scheme. Brooklyn A filed suit against the scheme organizers, their associates, the straw buyers and the lender. While the suit is ongoing, Brooklyn A was able to get the deed back in the client's name within a matter of months and is now pursuing claims regarding her mortgage.

See our client's story as covered by CBS 2 News.

UPDATE March 2009: Read our client's story as covered by the NYTimes.

From the New York Times...

In 2005, she fell behind on her mortgage payments and turned to a so-called rescue firm, which, court papers allege, tricked her into signing away the deed to her Brooklyn home. She says the company, Home Savers Consulting, secretly sold her home, with the help of a mortgage from IndyMac Federal Bank, and ran up huge new debts.

Now broke, deeply embarrassed and facing the loss of her small row house in the Brownsville neighborhood, Ms. Brickhouse, 69, faces a new problem. She must convince the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which last year took control of IndyMac, now insolvent, that her mortgage payments should not include at least $150,000 tacked on by fraud.

To assume these new costs, she says, would break her in two...

UPDATE April 2009: Read more news from the New York Times.

From the New York Times...

Mortgage fraud comes in several varieties. Most common today are deed thieves, who approach distressed owners and offer to straighten out finances by temporarily taking over deeds. Then they refinance and abscond with the ownersÕ equity. Others, more frequently during the boom years, rely on circles of appraisers who deliver inflated appraisals on demand, and on lawyers paid by the seller but purporting to represent the buyer, and on mortgage brokers, to persuade buyers to take on overpriced and often dilapidated homes.