Dina Pantazis thought she was buying time to save the Staten Island house where she had raised her kids. Instead, she says a foreclosure “rescue” deal stripped the home out from under her and ended with a marshal at the door giving her just 20 minutes to leave. Her story has become a gut punch warning for any homeowner who is behind on payments and desperate enough to believe a stranger promising an easy fix.
What happened to this Staten Island mom is not a one-off paperwork mix-up, it is part of a pattern of foreclosure prevention pitches that look like lifelines and turn out to be traps. The details of her scramble to pack up a life in minutes, and the red flags she now wishes she had spotted, show how quickly a bad decision can turn a financial crisis into a permanent loss.
‘They just wanted mortgage relief’ and lost everything
The pitch that hooked Dina Pantazis sounded familiar to anyone who has ever stared down a stack of unpaid bills: a company that said it could stop foreclosure, negotiate better terms and keep her family in their longtime Staten Island home. She was not alone. Several Staten Island families say they were drawn in by the same foreclosure prevention outfit, all of them looking for a way to hang on to houses that had been in their families for years, according to an investigation. They describe signing documents they did not fully understand, making payments they thought were going toward saving their mortgages and trusting a process that felt confusing but hopeful.
On social video, relatives and neighbors say they just wanted mortgage relief and instead watched people they knew lose their homes, blaming the owner of the foreclosure prevention company for what happened to multiple Staten Island properties. One of those homeowners, identified as Dina Pantazis, has described the heartbreak of seeing her kids’ rooms emptied out and family photos stacked in boxes after the deal she believed would save her house ended with someone else holding the deed. She says she followed the company’s instructions on the advice of her attorney, a detail that only deepened her sense of betrayal when she realized the home was gone.
Twenty minutes to leave a lifetime behind
By the time the knock came, the legal fight was already over. Dina Pantazis has said that when a marshal arrived at her Staten Island home, she was told she had about 20 minutes to get out. In that blur of time, she tried to grab birth certificates, medications and whatever clothes she could reach, while her children watched the only home they had known slip away. She later recalled running around the house in a panic as workers prepared to change the locks, a scene she has described in detail in personal accounts.
Video clips show Dina Pentas, another spelling used for her name, visibly shaken as she talks about her children being evicted from their longtime Staten Island home and the scramble to gather belongings while strangers waited to secure the property. In one clip, she appears surrounded by boxes and plastic bags, describing how text messages show various payments she made to the company that promised help, payments that did not stop the foreclosure or keep her family under that roof, according to Dina Pentas. Another segment introduces the case as an I Team exclusive, explaining that several Staten Island families followed similar advice from the same operator and ended up out on the street, a pattern laid out in the Now report.
The red flags she missed and how others can spot them
Looking back, Dina Pantazis has been blunt about the warning signs she wishes she had not brushed aside. She has said the company pushed her to sign over control of key documents, discouraged her from talking directly to her lender and kept demanding more money even as deadlines loomed, details that have been laid out in coverage of the Staten Island cases. Another account of the same ordeal notes that she was urged to pause mortgage payments while the company supposedly worked out a deal, a move that left her further behind and with fewer options when the foreclosure clock ran out, according to a separate Stat report.
Consumer advocates say the patterns in her story match classic foreclosure relief scams: upfront fees, vague guarantees and pressure to act fast. Guidance aimed at Island businesses and homeowners warns that charging fees before securing a loan modification is often illegal, that no third party can legitimately guarantee a specific outcome with a lender and that signing over ownership or title can lead to what some Staten Island homeowners learned is an irreversible loss. In the broader set of cases tied to this company, families say they were told to trust the process and ignore scary mail from the bank, only to discover later that the home had been sold and they were listed as tenants, a pattern described in Here.
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