Home Alone: Home Mortgage Foreclosure Rescue Scams and the Theft of Equity

Nathaniel C. Nichols, Widener Law

Abstract

Mortgage foreclosures caused by predatory lending and subprime mortgages seem to garner front page headlines on a daily basis. Greedy mortgage brokers, greedy banks, greedy investors, and financially illiterate consumers all share some blame for this crisis. However, the Mortgage Foreclosure Rescue Scam (MFRS) has caused a crisis of its own for decades. This article describes how MFRS works. It gives a detailed account of an actual victim of MFRS and proposes several solutions to prevent the scam, when the elderly are its target