Foreclosure filings surged 21 percent nationwide in the first half of 2026, and state officials warn that fraudsters posing as "home savers" are exploiting distressed homeowners at a pace that rivals the crisis itself.
Fabiana Polizzi lived in her Staten Island, New York, home for more than two decades, a block from the water, the place where she raised three children. On a recent afternoon, she watched her belongings loaded into trucks. She had turned to a local company for help getting a loan modification. The modification never came. Her home went into foreclosure, and then the eviction notice arrived.
Polizzi, a single mother of an eight-year-old boy and two seventeen-year-old girls, wrote a letter to a Richmond County judge pleading her case. "This is not just a financial transaction," she wrote. "This is our home. This is our life." The court filing did not save the house.
Her story sits at the front end of a national trend. An ABC News analysis of ATTOM data found that foreclosure filings jumped 21 percent in the first six months of 2026 compared to the same period in 2025. Pandemic-era programs that had kept foreclosure numbers artificially low have largely ended. The cost of living has climbed. And behind the numbers, a secondary industry of predatory operators has grown alongside the misery, targeting the very people least equipped to fight back.
Prentiss Cox, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, framed the stakes plainly:
"For most people, their home is the rock of their economic security plan. Having that taken away, and having the last bits of equity that they would have accumulated taken away, is just devastating."
In Arizona, the attorney general's office has filed a civil lawsuit against a man named Cameron Jones and unnamed co-defendants, alleging they ran a "racketeering enterprise" that stripped equity from homeowners across the state. Jones operated a company called "Arizona's Helping Hands." The name alone tells you the pitch.
Shane Ham, chief counsel of the Arizona Attorney General's Elder Abuse and Complex Litigation Unit, described the alleged scheme to ABC News. "The scheme starts with the scammers figuring out that somebody is in financial distress," Ham said. The operation allegedly monitored public foreclosure filings and dispatched people to a homeowner's door within twenty minutes of documents hitting the county recorder's office.
The surge in foreclosure filings across the country has made this kind of predatory speed more dangerous, not less. Every new filing is a public record, and every public record is an invitation for operators like those described in the Arizona lawsuit.
Ham defined the core fraud. "Equity stripping is when fraudsters will try to convince a homeowner to sell their home at far below the fair market value," he said. "They do that by convincing the homeowners that they are there to help them, when in fact they are there to take ownership of the house."
The Arizona attorney general's office alleges the scheme impacted hundreds of homeowners. Jones's attorney, whose name was not disclosed, wrote to the court that the case is flawed, that "there was no scheme," and that what Jones did "is not 'equity stripping.'" Jones himself did not comment. His attorney declined to speak to ABC News.
Vanessa Lewry, who lives in Canada, learned roughly a decade ago that her father's home in Mesa, Arizona, had entered foreclosure while he battled dementia. Jones allegedly appeared at her father's front door and convinced him to sign over the property.
Lewry started getting phone calls from a man who claimed to be her father's new landlord. "I said, 'What are you talking about?'" she recalled.
She took Jones to court and reached an agreement in which Jones did not admit wrongdoing. But the financial damage was done. Lewry estimates her family lost between $100,000 and $150,000, a figure that includes the loss of the home and attorney's fees. The broader toll was worse. "We used to go down there all the time," she said. "I'd go visit my family, and vacation there."
The housing affordability crisis has only widened the gap between what American families earn and what it costs to hold onto a home. Workers in most U.S. cities earn roughly $30,000 less than what's needed to buy one, which means losing a home to foreclosure, and then losing the remaining equity to a con artist, can be financially unrecoverable.
Lewry's father never got his house back. He died still asking for it. "Even until he died, he was in the hospital bed and he said, 'Get my house back,'" Lewry told ABC News. "And I said, 'I'll do my best.'"
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said the investigation into Jones and his associates has not concluded. Asked whether criminal prosecution could follow the civil case, Mayes did not rule it out. "I don't want to foreclose that possibility," she said.
But for now, the case remains civil. That distinction matters. Civil court can produce financial penalties and injunctions. It cannot produce a prison sentence. For families like Lewry's, who watched a man with dementia lose the most valuable asset he owned, the absence of criminal accountability is a gap that civil remedies alone may not close.
Mayes framed her priority as restitution. "For me, and I think for most of the families that we've talked to, the most important thing is to get their money back to them, to get their homes back to them, and to do it as quickly as humanly possible," she said. "And that's what we're trying to do."
She also issued a blunt warning to homeowners facing foreclosure: "Do not let one of these fraudsters in your house. Slam the door on them if you have to."
Chase Haller, who leads the Homeowner Protection Unit at the Indiana Attorney General's Office, explained the mechanics that make this kind of fraud so easy to execute. "When there's a foreclosure filing, that's actually public record," Haller told ABC affiliate WRTV. "A scammer can get that information very easily."
That openness, a feature of the American legal system designed to protect property rights and ensure transparency, becomes a weapon in the hands of predatory operators. The moment a foreclosure filing appears, the homeowner's name, address, and financial distress become available to anyone with an internet connection or a trip to the courthouse.
The long-term trajectory of foreclosure filings makes the problem structural, not episodic. Pandemic-era protections temporarily masked the trend. With those programs gone and costs rising, the pool of vulnerable homeowners has expanded, and so has the opportunity for fraud.
Officials and advocates have proposed several measures to address the gap. Among them: tightening regulations on people who approach homeowners without a real estate license, assessing penalties against lawyers and title companies involved in foreclosure schemes, and specifically banning equity stripping to give homeowners a legal foothold to recover losses. None of these proposals have been enacted into law yet.
State attorneys general and housing advocates advise homeowners facing foreclosure to contact their state attorney general's office, a licensed real estate agent, or a nonprofit real estate legal services provider before engaging with anyone who shows up at their door offering help.
Back on Staten Island, Polizzi packed up and left the home where she had expected to watch her daughters grow up. "They thought they were going to come down those stairs in their wedding dresses," she said.
She described the emotional weight of the move. "It becomes reality to watch your whole life being loaded into trucks, and it's worse when it's not because you want to." As a parent, she said, the failure felt personal. "It's hard because as a parent you're supposed to protect your kids and I feel like I failed them."
Polizzi moved to a rental in a different Staten Island neighborhood. "It's a nice neighborhood we're going to," she said. "It's quiet. But it's not home. And I don't know if it'll ever feel like home." The broader housing affordability crisis means millions of Americans share some version of that uncertainty, priced out of ownership and increasingly vulnerable to the kind of predatory schemes that thrive in the gap between hardship and help.
Lewry, for her part, wants the system itself to change. "I just wish that the police and the court services and the government would just really tighten up on this type of thing," she said.
When the government leaves a vacuum, when pandemic programs expire, when foreclosure filings become a scammer's shopping list, and when the only lawsuit on the table is civil, the people who fill that vacuum are rarely the ones with good intentions. Homeowners deserve better than a system that makes it easier to steal a house than to keep one.