My Foreclosure Story: A Fight for Justice
The true account of how a major bank illegally took my home — and why I’m still fighting to make it right.
In 2006, I bought my home in Oak Park, Michigan—a working-class suburb of Detroit. My mortgage was with Capital One–owned GreenPoint Mortgage Funding. For a year, everything was fine.
Then, without warning in early 2007, they began refusing my payments. Within months, they pushed me into default and foreclosed — even though they didn’t own my loan.
This is my story. It’s about theft, betrayal, and a 17-year fight for justice. It’s also about what happens when the system that’s supposed to protect you decides to protect the banks instead.
One day I was a homeowner in good standing. The next, my entire world had been turned upside down.
The Bigger Picture
At the time, I’d heard whispers about a housing bubble, but I had no idea I was an early casualty of one of the biggest financial crimes in modern history. I didn’t know I was up against Wall Street fraud so large it would help crash the global economy.
Before and after the foreclosure, I tried everything to work with GreenPoint/Capital One. I even hired an attorney. But they wouldn’t communicate—neither with me nor my lawyer—except to say that nothing could be done.
A Desperate Solution
In early 2008, I convinced a friend, a Marine veteran and real estate investor, to buy my home from the bank and rent it back to me.
It wasn’t ideal. It was survival. I promised to buy it back at market value once I’d cleared my name. I thought it would take a year or two. I had no idea it would take over a decade to uncover the truth.
For the next decade, I lived in limbo—month to month, paycheck to paycheck.
For the next decade, I lived in limbo—month to month, paycheck to paycheck. Every dollar went to living expenses and legal costs.
My credit was destroyed. I had no financial safety net.
I chased leads, filed complaints, studied foreclosure law, and fought like hell. One step forward, two steps back.
The system wasn’t built to protect people like me. It was built to protect the banks. Still, I wouldn’t quit. I knew the evidence was out there. I just had to find it.
Breakthrough
In 2017, I hired a financial fraud investigator to audit my mortgage. It was expensive, but it was the best money I ever spent.
The very first line of his report:
This is a fairly simple and straightforward case of wrongful foreclosure due to fraud.
The investigator found that GreenPoint/Capital One didn’t even own my loan when they foreclosed. Goldman Sachs did. They had pooled my mortgage into a securitized trust, GSAA Home Equity Trust 2006-14, and sold it on Wall Street.
I had been paying a bank that no longer held my loan — and they foreclosed anyway.
The Smoking Gun
Among the documents uncovered was a forged Assignment of Mortgage. This notarized document is required for a bank to foreclose. Mine was robo-signed — part of a mass-production fraud where low-level employees signed thousands of foreclosure documents daily without reading them.
In 2013, 49 state Attorneys General and federal regulators found 13 major banks guilty of robo-signing fraud and fined them $9.3 billion. My case was textbook.
In November 2019, I filed a federal lawsuit against Capital One, within the two-year window allowed under the Equitable Tolling doctrine. The case began, but in March 2020 COVID shut the courts down.
Their attorneys offered a dismissal without prejudice, allowing me to refile later while keeping my original filing date. I agreed — in writing. But the pandemic drained my finances, leaving me unable to refile.
Today, I still have the case. I still have the evidence. I’m still fighting to get it back in court.
A Partial Homecoming
In 2022, my friend honored our agreement and sold my house back to me on a land contract. On paper, I own my home again.
But the damage remains:
My mortgage is $60,000 higher than my 2006 loan.
Property taxes have tripled.
And I’ve lost years I can’t get back.
The fraudulent Assignment of Mortgage alone proves GreenPoint/Capital One stole my home. Yet, every agency I’ve turned to—the CFPB, Michigan Attorney General, FTC, SEC, HUD—has turned their back.
Every piece of evidence, I found myself. No regulator lifted a finger.
They knocked me down — but they didn’t break me. I refuse to let them win.
Donate Now to help me refile my case and hold them accountable.
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