Digital Library: Home Equity Theft Scams—An Old Problem Takes on New Forms

By: Sarah Bolling Mancini, Geoff Walsh

January 26, 2026 — Article

Americans now own more than $35 trillion in home equity. Home equity, like any other valuable property, attracts thieves. Past home equity theft schemes focused on homeowners facing foreclosure. NCLC’s Home Foreclosures Chapter 17 describes the foreclosure rescue scams that proliferated in the wake of the Great Recession’s foreclosure crisis.

Increased property values attract new forms of home equity theft. A recent NCLC article describes the growth in Home Equity “Investment” (HEI) loans—HEI transactions are high-cost loans disguised as “investments,” where the investment nomenclature seeks to evade consumer laws applying to mortgage lending. 

This article describes three other emerging home equity theft schemes; the first is new and the latter two are refinements of scam techniques that have been around for decades: 

• The MV Realty model: recording a lien that commits a homeowner to use a specific real estate listing service;
• The We Buy Houses model: high-pressure home sale campaigns; and
• The sale-leaseback model: disguised sale transactions structured around a deceptive repurchase option.