PREDATORY LENDERS – These scammers help themselves to your homes

Michell Fayez Olabi thought that she was getting help. In 2001, approximately four months behind in mortgage payments on her two-family home in Rosedale, six weeks pregnant with her fifth child, and unable to work due to a car accident, she answered a flyer circulating in her neighborhood promising to help her save her home.
The &#8220promised help” has resulted in an arduous journey for Fayez Olabi and her family involving four lawyers, numerous court dates, eviction from their home, and a three-month stay on the floor of her mother-in-law's apartment - amounting to 14 people in a two-bedroom flat.
Fayez Olabi and her family are the victims of what Oda Friedheim of Queens Legal Aid refers to as foreclosure rescue scams, which most often occur in communities of color and among seniors. Predators often scour public records for homes in foreclosure or circulate flyers. Desperate, and vulnerable, believing that God has answered their prayers homeowners take the bait.
The Olabi's experience dovetailed with what Friedheim describes as the typical scenario of foreclosure rescue swindles. A &#8220straw buyer” was presented to the Fayez Olabi family as an investor, who was &#8220necessary” due to their bad credit. The &#8220investor's name would temporarily” go on the deed, and a lawyer furnished by the fraud artist would represent them. Like a staged play, these characters and a mortgage lender strip owners of their home.
Believing that they were merely refinancing their home, the Olabi's never realized that they had in fact sold their home and were now tenants of the &#8220straw buyer,” until faced with eviction and entangled in legal proceedings in Landlord Tenant Court.
Fayez Olabi said she asked herself, &#8220Why is he now treating us like tenants, he was supposed to be helping us out for a year?”
It is what led her and her sister-in-law, Madeline Holder, to establish Community Homeowners And Neighbors Gaining Economic Rights (CHANGER), an organization to empower homeowners and fight against abusive and fraudulent lending practices. CHANGER, and 121 other organizations that comprise New Yorkers for Responsible Lending (NYRL) were instrumental in advocating on the behalf of stricter lending laws, recently celebrating a victorious milestone with the passage of the Home Equity Theft Prevention Act.
The Home Equity Prevention Act requires written disclosure to homeowners regarding the terms of a title transfer of a home in foreclosure, allowing a five-day rescind period. It prohibits making false statements with intent to defraud the homeowner and provides for a consumer education notice to be sent to all homeowners in foreclosure warning them about such scams. The legislation establishes civil and criminal penalties for violating the law.
Fayez Olabi, who currently rents a three-bedroom apartment in Queens, realizes now that &#8220she was far away from foreclosure.” At the helm of CHANGER she is on a mission to prevent others from being victimized. Fayez Olabi and Holder work tirelessly, holding seminars in their office in Harlem every Monday night, informing others of the options that are available to them - a lesson Fayez Olabi learned too late.