A Long Island man promised dream homes. Buyers say they got a nightmare.
Michael O’Sullivan had a pitch that was hard to refuse. He’d track down desperate homeowners who had abandoned their Hamptons properties after the 2008 financial crisis, offer them cash for their deeds, then resell those properties to buyers hungry for a deal in one of the country’s most expensive property markets.
What followed, according to more than a dozen lawsuits, were years of alleged fraud, threats and financial ruin, Curbed reported.
O’Sullivan founded Hampton Dream Properties after attending a real estate seminar where he learned about the coming wave of foreclosures.
His strategy was simple.
“I had to track them down; they’d be hiding out in the mountains in North Carolina or something,” he told Curbed. “And so I would go to North Carolina, I would go to South Florida, and I would get a certified bank check. And I would say, ‘Sell me the deed to your house.’”
A former associate, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the math was straightforward.
“You offer somebody who’s about to lose their house $25,000, $15,000 cash to sign over their deed, they’re going to say ‘Yeah, I’d love to,’” the associate told the outlet.
The scheme turned predatory, the associate alleged, when someone suggested selling deeds to new buyers even though the underlying mortgages hadn’t been resolved.
“He sort of figured out how to take advantage of it from both ends,” the associate said. “Like an evil, f–ked-up genius.”
Plaintiffs allege O’Sullivan sold properties he didn’t own, misrepresented title status, held onto deeds to take out high-value loans and funneled buyer payments toward new acquisitions instead of clearing the debts on properties he’d already sold.
Many victims were Latino first-time buyers with limited English who were told, according to the lawsuits, that they didn’t need their own attorneys.
Diana, a Colombian housekeeper who has lived in the Hamptons for 15 years, said she and her husband Mauricio paid O’Sullivan nearly $200,000 under a private mortgage agreement, then spent an additional $300,000 rebuilding a house in East Hampton from the studs up.
Two years in, they received a foreclosure notice from the Bank of New York Mellon.
“In the moment, you’re just thinking, This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she told Curbed. “And I’ve always believed in the justice of this country, in the rule of law. You’d never think this kind of corruption and fraud happens here and much less in a place like this.”
For the next seven years, O’Sullivan and his lawyers allegedly assured her the case was under control. When the property neared auction, he allegedly pushed Diana and Mauricio to file for bankruptcy twice.
In 2022, he summoned them to a Panera Bread in Hampton Bays, where Diana says he slammed what appeared to be a police badge on the table. He later denied showing the badge to anyone, saying it was honorary recognition for procuring PPE during COVID.
Eventually the couple alleges they were pressured to sign a document that turned out to be a short-sale contract transferring the home back to O’Sullivan’s company. O’Sullivan allegedly then sold it to a corporation created four days earlier, which shared a registered address with a company owned by one of his attorneys. Hampton Dream then took out a $900,000 mortgage on the house.
Other plaintiffs tell similar stories.
Juan Amon, who had paid more than $350,000, was informed by East Hampton police that he was not the legal owner of his home.
Rosa Quituisaca discovered multiple liens on her property, including some tied to O’Sullivan’s traffic tickets.
Milton Barrera returned home one day to find a stranger claiming he had purchased it from the bank.
O’Sullivan maintains his intentions were legitimate, insisting the foreclosure market was inherently risky and buyers knew that going in.
“It was crystal clear from day one that these were foreclosures,” he said. “And they were risky.”
He insists he could have resolved the cases if buyers hadn’t taken legal action.
“I could fix them today if these people would shut their mouths up,” he said.
The New York State Attorney General has opened an investigation into O’Sullivan for deed and mortgage fraud. Two days before a scheduled deposition in May, O’Sullivan filed for bankruptcy, freezing all active litigation.
