She filed her military orders - the suit says her lender's counsel certified otherwise
A mortgage servicer twice certified an active-duty soldier wasn't serving, then locked her out of her home, a lawsuit alleges.
The suit, filed July 8 in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey, names Freedom Mortgage Corporation and its foreclosure counsel as defendants over a VA-guaranteed loan. The borrower says she has served on active duty without a break since April 2017 and holds a secret security clearance. She is representing herself.
Her account runs like this. She took out a $262,911 VA loan through Veterans United Home Loans in February 2022. The mortgage moved to Freedom Mortgage in July 2023. In March 2025, the servicer's foreclosure counsel filed to foreclose in state court.
The heart of the case is a piece of federal law every foreclosure shop knows. The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act requires a lender chasing a judgment to file a sworn statement on whether the borrower is in uniform, and to show the facts behind it. A database check alone doesn't satisfy that duty. According to the filing, the servicer's counsel certified in October 2025 that the borrower was not in service. On that basis, the suit says, the state court entered a foreclosure judgment against her that November.
Then it happened again, she alleges. After she moved to reopen the case and put authenticated military orders in front of the court, the filing says a second sworn certification went in during June 2026, again stating she was not serving. That certification, court papers say, rested entirely on a search of the Defense Department's manpower database, a system the suit argues is known to miss servicemembers in certain roles. The filing notes the database report itself tells requesters to confirm status with the person's service branch when active duty is claimed.
That's the line servicing and compliance leaders will want to sit with. The suit frames the database reliance as willful rather than accidental, pointing in particular to the second certification, which it says came after the borrower had already placed authenticated military orders before the court.
Two other issues will feel familiar to anyone running a default-servicing operation. The lawsuit says Freedom Mortgage never established that it holds the promissory note, raising the prospect that the loan sits in a Ginnie Mae pool and that the servicer lacks standing to foreclose in its own name. It also claims the servicer did not complete the VA's mandatory loss-mitigation review before filing, arguing that a trial modification that fell through in 2023 did not stand in for the pre-foreclosure evaluation the rules require.
The last piece is the lockout. On or about July 3, 2026, the borrower says she came home to changed locks, with no sheriff's sale, no writ of possession, and no court order. The suit describes a self-help eviction barred by both federal law and New Jersey statute, carried out while the fight over her military status was still open.
She is seeking actual and punitive damages, treble damages under New Jersey's Consumer Fraud Act, attorneys' fees, and an order wiping out the state judgment and restoring her access to the home.
The allegations have not been tested in court. As of the filing, no judge had ruled. The claims remain unproven.
