NJ Couple Regrets Falling For Refinance/Bill Consolidation Opportunity That Turned Out To Be Disguised Sale Leaseback Foreclosure Rescue Scam

In Fair Lawn, New Jersey, WCBS-TV Channel 2 reports:

• Imagine living in your home for 20 years, making payments every month, then one day having a sheriff show up with a moving truck to force you out.
  
  It sounds impossible, but as CBS2’s Dick Brennan reported, it’s a lot easier than you might think to end up the victim of a stolen home. “It’s a nightmare,” Josephine Nisevic said.
  
  Nisevic and her husband, Nick, were technically trespassing on their own property when they looked at the empty house with CBS2’s Brennan.
  
  “It kills me that I can’t go inside my house,” she said. They can’t go inside, because the Fair Lawn home no longer belongs to them. It was stolen. “You work. You work hard for what you have, and then things like this happen,” Nisevic said.
  
  It all started in 2005, when the couple received an offer in the mail to refinance and consolidate their bills. “It looked great. My husband said, ‘Oh, look at this, they fix your credit,’ so we went along with it,” Nisevic said.
  
  What the couple didn’t know was that it was all an elaborate scheme to steal their deed and strip the equity from their house.
  
  “What happens here in these situations, people start to think that oh, this is part of the process. They end up giving out this information, and then that information can be used to prepare all of these documents, and forge signatures, and all the rest, and then that person is out of a home,” attorney Chris Cabanillas said.
  
  Dozens of other local homeowners also fell victim to the same scam artists known as Rivertown Financial Service. The company has since been shuttered and the principals sent to jail.(1)
  
  But Nisevic’s story doesn’t end there.
  
  “Imagine, losing your home. Your kids grew up there, you put that little line on that doorway every time your little baby girl gets two inches taller,” said the family’s attorney, Nima Ameri, “and then one day there are moving boxes that says, ‘Get out’ because there was a fraudulent mortgage scheme. ‘We want this property, we’re going to sell it at market value.'”
  
  The home, which eventually fell into foreclosure, was sold at auction. It is now the property of Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation.
  
  Freddie Mac, as the corporation is more commonly known, said they’ll sell the house back to the Nisevics — but at full market price, which is about $160,000 more than what the couple originally paid in 1995.

For more, see Elaborate Mortgage Scam Leaves Victims Without Home.

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(1) See Upstate NY Sale Leaseback Peddler Gets 4 To 12 For Grand Larceny Conviction In Equity Stripping Ripoff Of Cash-Poor, Hi-Equity Homeowners In F'closure.

Watch CNBC's American Greed episode on Rivertown Financial - "The Home Invaders."