Like most people, Quentella Livers, a 75-year-old widow from New Orleans, sometimes gets scammy solicitations in the mail. So, when she received a statement in May 2023 from a financial technology company called Dividend Finance, informing her that a lien had been taken out on a property she owned, she threw the document away, figuring it was junk.
But the notices kept coming. Livers kept discarding them—until she got a letter from a man named Jason, another New Orleans homeowner. Jason had been receiving similar correspondence, and had checked property records to learn that another finance company called GoodLeap had taken out a lien on his own home, as well as one on Livers.’ It wasn't just them. Someone from a contractor called Deep South Renovations had allegedly taken out hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans from Dividend and GoodLeap on at least eight homes in the New Orleans area by impersonating the homeowners and using their properties as collateral, according to Jason, who is in touch with the homeowners.
This person, listed in two contracts as Samantha McGee, had taken advantage of the fact that GoodLeap and Dividend pay loans directly to the contractors performing home-improvement projects rather than to homeowners. McGee had used real people and home addresses but fake Social Security numbers and email addresses to secure the loans, Livers and Jason say. The perpetrator appears to have depended on GoodLeap and Dividend not running a title search on the homes to ensure that the Social Security numbers and identities on the loan application matched the ones on file, Jason says. Livers called both companies to try and get the lien released, a process that she says proved difficult.
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