Home Is Where the Heart Is

Message From the President and CEO

By Alfonso E. Lenhardt, President and CEO

We focus much of our attention in crime prevention on the home. Be it humble or grand, home is the sanctuary of families, the place where parents bring up their children, and the place from which their kids depart to lead their own lives. In many cases, it is also the place where grandparents come to live in their later years.

When NCPC was first founded, we taught home safety basics. We taught people to lock their homes securely and to make sure that the areas around doors were well-lighted. We taught folks to trim their shrubbery so no one could hide behind it. Now we teach people to protect their homes by protecting their whole neighborhoods through Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design and support to reentry programs that are intended to help ex-offenders become whole citizens who again contribute to society. Safe neighborhoods make safe homes.

But imagine if there were a threat you couldn’t protect your home against. Imagine if your home were threatened not by a burglar, but by a financial disaster. Suppose a costly illness or a lost job caused by the financial downturn or some other unforeseen circumstance—perhaps a bad loan taken from a predatory lender—caused you to fall behind in your payments and you were facing the catastrophe of foreclosure. That increasingly is what’s happening to many American families.

Desperate for the chance to keep their homes, families in distress have become the target of some of the most unscrupulous swindlers around. Scam artists are targeting these desperate homeowners with clever promises to solve their financial problems, but, instead they often end up with the title to the home and the homeowner’s money as well. The crimes perpetrated by these con artists are complex and almost always involve some type of identity theft. They are reminders to think twice before you give out your personal information, especially your Social Security number; never sign a document unless you fully understand it (get a relative or neighbor to read it over with you); never sign a document that has unfilled blanks in it; and always be ready to say “No,” no matter how much you need help.

Elsewhere in this issue of Catalyst there is an article about foreclosure scams. I hope you will take it to heart and share it with your friends and neighbors as may be appropriate. After all, these con artists are a soulless bunch. They’re like any other scammers that may confront us, whether they be identity thieves or telemarketing fraudsters. They are out-and-out criminals who are wrecking lives for their own gain, and they deserve nothing less than being put away where they cannot hurt innocent people.