Imagine buying a home and moving in, only to find out later that the house was never yours at all.

It's a mortgage scheme that's caused financial pain and heartache for many families in Western Washington.

It's a scam so bizarre it's hard to believe anyone could pull it off.

But we've tracked down the woman at the center of it all, a mortgage broker whose deception is  costing people their good credit, a lot of money, and the dream of owning their own home.

After renting for years, Mary Pelayo and her family were thrilled to buy a home of their own in Everett.

"Owning your own home is a major achievement in your life and it's what we wanted," Pelayo said.

Three months after moving in, the Pelayos found out the house belonged to someone else.

It was tough, but they packed up and moved out.

"We lived in this house for over three months. We thought this was our home, we started fixing it up," Pelayo said. "We put a lot of money into it, a lot of work, and then to find out it's not ours."

How can you possibly buy a house and find out later it's not yours?  After studying hundreds of pages of real estate records, e-mails, and phone logs, the KING 5 Investigators have figured it out.

Liza Bautista, a polished mortgage broker, who routinely touts her churchgoing ways, is at the center of it all.

Bautista often tells clients she's a Christian who likes to help people with rocky credit buy their first home.

Mary Pelayo is one of those people. 

She saw an ad for Bautista's business that sounded perfect:  "Want to buy a house, credit problems?  We can help."

"It was awesome," Pelayo said, "until it all started falling apart."

The bombshell that showed something was wrong was name on the mortgage bill, not Pelayo, but Lydia Pagdilao.

Lydia Pagdilao says someone must have forged her signature.  The documents show she owns the Pelayo's house, but she says she's never heard of it.

"I didn't buy any property in Everett," Pagdilao said.

KING

Liza Bautista, a polished mortgage broker, is at the center of it all.

The KING 5 Investigators discovered the mortgage broker, Liza Bautista has several other clients whose homes ended up in someone else's name.

The Eesekieles thought they bought their first home in federal way.

But the real owner is Mercedes Loquillano. And her signature is on a deed.

She had no clue she'd bought the house until we arrived at her door.

A third family, the Villicanas, thought they'd bought a condo in Kirkland.

But it's really in the name of the Bruans, who said they didn't put their names on the papers to buy the property.

We hired respected handwriting expert Tim Nishimura to study the deeds to see if the signatures are indeed fake. He concluded they were all "non-genuine forgeries."

Every person whose signature was forged, like Lydia Pagdilao, had given their financial information to Liza Bautista in the past for deals that were legitimate.

Later, when Bautista couldn't get loans for families with credit problems, like the Pelayos, she secretly replaced their paperwork with information she took from clients with good credit.

With the deals pushed through, she collected her commissions.  

And that's not all.  Bautista offered a professional favor to the families who thought they'd bought a home: She'd collect their mortgage payments, and pass the cash onto the bank for them.

But notices of default and delinquency show the money never made it that far, trashing the good credit of unsuspecting buyers like the Bruans.

"I feel so bad, depressed, it's terrible," Rowena Bruan said.

Calls from collection agencies are pouring in. Bruan says she gets them every day, sometimes twice a day.

"It's somebody that they trusted, a professional that they trusted with their personal financial information, who stole that information and used it for her own personal gain," Attorney Michelle Farris said.  "I think that's why this case is so scary."

We had a lot of questions for Liza Bautista and we finally tracked her down in her church parking lot. We asked her why she was making people believe that they're buying homes, when it really was not their home.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Bautista responded.

When asked if she had been forging signatures so people can buy a house that's not really theirs, she again responded, "I don't know what you're talking about."

We also found Bautista wasn't operating alone - the forged signatures were notarized.

The KING 5 Investigators traced every licensed notary public to the escrow company Bautista often used, Action Escrow in Kent.

When we went to Action Escrow to ask an employee about the papers she had notarized, we were kicked out of the building by her boss, Anthony Szabo, who also notarized one of the forged documents.

So, what mess is left behind?

First time home buyers like the Pelayos are out money and back to renting.

The people who had their signatures forged, including Lydia Pagdilao, are struggling to repair their damaged credit, and the mortgage broker is dodging our cameras, and the string of clients she's hurt along the way.

"Shame on them, how can you do this to innocent hard working people?" Pelayo asked. "I mean, it's everybody's dream to own their own home."