‘Honey, you’ve been scammed,’ she was told. She lost her home of 30 years.

Barbara Barkley is 4 feet 10 inches tall. So she designed her home in Chesapeake, Va., just for herself, with all the counters and handles lowered.



People told her the changes would make the house harder to sell, but she didn’t care.

“I planned to live there until I died,” said Barkley, 68.

Instead, she is renting a place from a relative in North Carolina. She lost her house and her savings to a group of California scam artists who stole $11 million from thousands of struggling homeowners looking for help with their mortgages.

The ringleader, 42-year-old Sammy Araya, was sentenced in federal court in Alexandria earlier this month to 20 years in prison. Eleven others got sentences ranging from five to 18 years.

While the court case is all but over, Barkley and other victims continue to deal with the fallout of a crime that destroyed them financially and often emotionally.

“I literally lost everything because of these people, and it’s breaking my heart,” said Barkley, a retired accountant. “I paid for it all myself, didn’t have a man to pay for it for me, and then some stranger gets to destroy it.”

The scam began in 2011 when Araya’s group started sending out mailers and put up Internet ads promising mortgage modifications under an Obama administration program meant to stem fallout from the housing crisis.

The program was real, but the offers were not. Homeowners were directed to send a cash “reinstatement” fee and then monthly “trial payments” for their new monthly mortgage. The money, they were told, would go to the lender.

Instead, the conspirators pocketed the funds and ignored increasingly desperate calls from their customers. Barkley found out the truth when a man on a motorcycle came to paste a notice from her mortgage lender on the door warning of foreclosure. She called the company to tell it she had been sending her checks as required.

[link to jacksonville.com]