Couple fights mortgage fraud
Excerpt from an article by Jessica Leeder - Toronto Star
“Hello, we’re not trying to sell you anything. I’m your neighbour.”
This is Muriel Chudiak’s favourite doorstep pitch, which she delivers in singsong voice with a big, pink-lipstick smile, her husband Bill at her side.
It’s usually enough to spark curiosity, and for Muriel to get her foot in the door — literally. Bill’s job is to hold it open in those first critical moments.
Muriel cues the props.
“We’ve been taking around a petition — I wonder if you can help us.” Her thousand-watt smile beams away beneath the porch-light glare as she pulls papers from a portfolio adorned with official Queen’s Park letterhead.
Many are newspaper clippings the couple began collecting seven months ago after reading in the Star about property owners losing their homes through mortgage fraud and title theft. Fuelled by outrage, they started shopping a petition in their Mississauga neighbourhood seeking to toughen proposed legislation.
On their journey to right what they see as a terrible wrong, they have discovered something else — their neighbourhood and people they should have met long ago. “I’m meeting people I’ve never seen in my life before. And I’ve lived here for 21 years,” Muriel said.
Not that it is always easy.
Even where the lights are on, people don’t always answer the door, a trend that has forced Muriel to refine her routine — and Bill his supporting role, which involves offering context, comic relief, and a flashlight on darker parts of the street — to get right to the nitty-gritty.
She peppers her early chat with buzz terms like “fraud artist” and “identity theft,” then zooms straight in on the doe-eyed, unknowing homeowners she has set out to inform.
“What they do is they steal your identity. They take a mortgage out on your house. They take off with the money, and you’re stuck with it. That’s really the long and the short of it.”
The brash rundown prompted a moment of disbelieving silence on Sandra Wash’s halogen-lit doorstep. Her house was one of Muriel and Bill’s last stops on their final night of canvassing this week, capping their two-week effort to ink 300 of their neighbours’ signatures on a petition they’ll deliver to Queen’s Park.
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