Mortgage Fraud/Predatory Lending-Who Can I Go After For Justice?

[alex12345]

What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Connecticut



I'm at my very end of what I should do here so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. So far I've spoken to two attorneys and neither of them have any experience with predatory lending and how to approach the situation.

Back in 2007 I met a real estate "flipper" who would buy houses cheap and resell them for profit. I had no idea how it was done but it always facinated me from the millions of infomercials I've seen on tv so I asked him how he got started. He said he began buying and renting out multifamilies, holding onto them for years and then reselling them. Eventually he got into flipping.

After he saw that he had a somewhat naive guy in front of him asking him for advice he quickly started getting friendly with me, inviting me out to dinner, shopping, met his family.....I thought I actually had a new friend who would help me get into real estate investing.

I had never purchased a house in my life before so I had very little knowledge of home loans but he asked me if I would allow one of his mortgage guys to pull my credit to see if I could qualify for a loan. It turned out I had great credit and money in the bank so he said I was "good to go".

This "flipper" showed me a two family that he just bought and rennovated and assured me that it would be a great place to buy and if anything breaks he would take care of it and if there were any vacancies he would cover the mortgage amount so I don't lose anything. He said if I buy it from him he'll take care of the down payment, attorney fees, home inspection, appraisal and everything else.

Call me gullible or naive but I thought this guy was genuine and I believed him. I gave the loan officer only a breif phone interview when we originally spoke when 2 weeks later I get a call saying that we're closing on your house at 2:00 today. I had no idea what was going on. The "flipper" called me up and said to get down to his attorney's office if I want the house. I went down there and was instructed to just sign and initial the papers and we'd be done. Which I did. It was the "flippers" attorney who explained absolutely nothing to me at all.

Anyways to make a long story short, 2 years later and my house has cost me just about everything I have in the bank to repair, the "flipper" who promised to make my mortgage payments stopped being my "friend" and never contributed a dime, my perfect credit is shot and I'm just about ready to go into foreclosure.

I got a copy of the ORIGINAL purchase contract and everything sent to the bank to approve me for the loan. My income was doubled on the loan origination form, the appraisal had pictures from another house on the inside and was greatly inflated, there were phony letters and bank statements "created" by the mortgage officers and my signature was forged on EVERYTHING. (However, at the closing I signed what they put in front of me and it was a lot of the same papers.)

The mortgage officers have been arrested by the FBI for mortgage fraud but the seller of the house is actually still "flipping" properties and just opened up a new restaurant which just got voted best new place of the year in a local magazine.

So while I'm faceing foreclosure this guy is still buying cheap properties (in his 74 year old mother's name) and selling them 2 months later to other naive people like me for a huge profit. And has a successful restaurant business going now too.

I was almost too embarassed to write this up since it seems like I would get voted "sucker of the year" for being so trusting. Ironically, I have a MA in Psychology but got conned royally by these people.

Is there anyway I can go after the loan officers, sellers, attorney or appraisers who were involved in this scheme? I purchased my house for 270,000 from that crook and the house across the street just sold for 130,000 so I can't even do a short sale.

I live in Connecticut so if anyone knows of anything I can do or anyone I should contact I would really appreciate it. I would love to just get rid of the house, get my money back and restore my credit. If there's any chance of civil lawsuit or if I'm wasting my time I'd love to hear what anyone has to say.

Thanks in advance.What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)?

[JustAPal00]

What do you have in writing as far as your original agreement with the flipper? If it's all verbal, I'm going to go out on a limb and say he'll deny it. Did you sign the form that had your stated income on it?

[alex12345]

During the phone interview I told him my income. On the original loan application sent to the bank to get me approved,they doubled the amount I told them and signed my name. They signed my name on every document submitted to the bank. The purchase and sale agreement was also forged.

His attorney went through the closing in 5 minutes and just said initial here, sign there and I made the mistake of doing so.

The originals were forged but at the closing I signed everything without knowing what I was signing.