Eight years after three Field Service Technicians forced National Field Network into involuntary bankruptcy, not a single penny has been paid to Labor. The lawyers are still billing. The trustee is still filing. And the principal architect of one of the most brazen fraud schemes in the history of the mortgage field services industry died in a fiery rollover crash in Mason County on October 16, 2024 — wanted by United States Marshals at the time of her death — before she ever faced meaningful accountability in a courtroom.
Shari Nott is dead. The contractors she stole from are still waiting.
This is the story of what justice looks like when the system decides Labor does not deserve any.
Who Was Shari Nott and What Was National Field Network
National Management and Preservation Services LLC, doing business as National Field Network, was headquartered at 73 Broad Street in Red Bank, New Jersey. Federal EIN 27-1136001. Nott was its CEO and operating principal. Under her leadership, NFN functioned as a national aggregator in the mortgage field services industry, routing work orders from servicers and national platforms down to a dispersed network of independent FSTs and Inspectors who performed property preservation labor and occupancy assessments on defaulted and delinquent mortgage properties across the country.
What Nott built was not a business. It was an extraction machine. According to court filings and investigative reporting, she used company funds to purchase luxury vehicles, open new companies and acquire foreclosed assets in Michigan, purchase homes in New Jersey and the Bahamas, issue multimillion-dollar loans to herself and others, and pay for her children’s college tuition. The FSTs and Inspectors whose labor generated the revenue that funded that lifestyle were simply not paid. Their invoices went unanswered. Their businesses collapsed. Their savings were drained. Some of them never recovered.
The Oglensky family — Jonathan, Blake Eugene, Emma Rose, Sophie J., and Rachel M. Oglensky — were named as defendants in a Section 548 fraudulent transfer adversary proceeding filed by the Chapter 7 trustee in May 2024, more than six years into the bankruptcy. The trustee’s theory was that estate assets were improperly transferred to benefit family members. He obviously will never face accountability in a courtroom. The only asset of note in this entire proceeding — the sale proceeds from Nott’s New Jersey home — sit in escrow held by Oglensky’s personal attorneys, not the trustee, and not a dollar of it has been disbursed to victims.
How It Began: Labor Forced NFN Into Court
NFN did not file for bankruptcy voluntarily. Three petitioning creditors dragged the company into federal court on April 6, 2018, by filing an involuntary Chapter 7 petition in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey, Case No. 18-16859-CMG.
These were not institutional creditors with litigation war chests. They were FSTs and small regional operators who had performed work, submitted invoices, and received nothing. They retained attorney David Shaver — missing since the initial filling of the case — of Broege, Neumann, Fischer and Shaver in Manasquan and used the only legal tool available to them. NFN was not going to pay voluntarily. The national platforms above NFN in the food chain were not going to intervene. HUD was not going to intervene. Fannie Mae was not going to intervene. NAMFS was certainly not going to intervene. The petitioners acted alone, at personal expense, because no one else would act at all.
NFN’s principals immediately moved to convert to Chapter 11 and sought reorganization. They filed operating reports late. They retained Ravin Greenberg LLC and attempted to advance a plan of orderly liquidation that went nowhere. The U.S. Trustee moved to convert back to Chapter 7 in January 2019, citing failure to file monthly operating reports. Chief Judge Christine M. Gravelle granted that conversion on April 2, 2019. The case has been in Chapter 7 ever since. That was more than six years ago.
The Trustee, the Billing, and the Admission
The case was initially assigned to Chapter 7 trustee Bunce Atkinson, who was removed on July 20, 2020, and replaced by successor trustee Andrea Dobin of McManimon, Scotland and Baumann. The trustee’s counsel, Michele Dudas of that same firm, has been the operational face of this proceeding for years. The billing has been relentless. It has been a feeding frenzy of #Epic proportions!
McManimon, Scotland and Baumann’s first interim fee application covering July 2020 through May 2021 sought $118,284.50 in fees plus $5,192.53 in expenses. Granted. The second application covering June 2021 through May 2022 sought $223,520.50 in fees plus $6,785.37 in expenses. Granted. Accountants Withum Smith and Brown PC billed the estate across four separate applications totaling more than $111,000. Bederson LLP filed multiple applications across both the Chapter 11 and Chapter 7 phases. Special counsel Muller, Baatenburg and Wilson Law Group was separately retained in August 2024 — six full years into the Chapter 7 phase. Every dollar paid to these professionals is a dollar not paid to the people NFN stole from.
That is simply the billing that was publicly acknowledged! The record went silent after we began reporting on it. Foreclosurepedia estimates the ultimate bill in the millions! Think about that. All the money that was initially stolen from Labor by NFN now gets paid to others throwing pencils at a dart board!
For years, Dudas declined to acknowledge the petitioners as victims in any formal capacity initially. Foreclosurepedia engaged her directly in contentious correspondence over whether those defrauded by NFN qualified as victims under the law. She did not dispute that harm occurred. She simply refused to characterize it in human terms. That silence ended on November 13, 2023, when Dudas filed the following language in court: “The Trustee recognizes that many of the creditors in this proceeding have suffered more than just a monetary loss at the hands of the Debtor as operated by Nott — they are actual victims, which have had their business lives and personal affairs devastated by this Debtor and Nott.”
That acknowledgment was filed in 2023. It is now 2026. Not a penny has followed it.
The Sweetheart Deals
The adversary proceedings launched by the trustee beginning December 30, 2020 targeted American Express, Bank of America, NFN-related successor entities, attorney Victor Deutch and his firm Deutch and Associates, and the principals Jaffa, Nott, and Christopher Crandell. Here is what the record shows about outcomes.
Victor Deutch, NFN’s attorney who attempted to pressure petitioners into accepting pennies on the dollar, was eventually forced into bankruptcy himself and left the legal profession. Chris Crandell settled individually for a fraction of what he owed. Jack Jaffa — identified in court filings as a co-owner or associate of the enterprise — settled by consent order dated December 21, 2023. No objection was filed. The terms are practically invisible to the public. Foreclosurepedia reported at the time on what one petitioner told us directly: “That was a slap in the face to everyone who brought this case forward. He helped cause the damage, and then he walks away with money from the same account we’re not even allowed to touch.” Jaffa not only secured a favorable settlement shielding him from full liability — he was subsequently allowed to collect funds from the bankruptcy estate while the victims remained unpaid.
Since the involuntary petition was filed against National Field Network on April 6, 2018, the United States has been led by three presidents. Donald Trump was in office when the petition landed, completing his first term through January 2021. Joe Biden then served a full four-year term through January 2025. Donald Trump returned to the White House for a second term beginning January 20, 2025, and sits in office today. Three presidents. Two parties. Zero federal action on behalf of the contractors NFN stole from.
Shari Nott spent years evading the trustee’s information subpoenas. A consent order compelling her cooperation was entered October 27, 2020. She ignored it. A motion to compel was filed in February 2024. The court granted it in March 2024. When Nott continued to refuse compliance, the trustee moved for contempt. On April 18, 2024, Chief Judge Gravelle signed the contempt order reproduced in part below. The United States Marshals Service was commanded to arrest Nott wherever she might be found. The order authorized whatever force was reasonably necessary, including forcible entry into her residence at 646 Bray Avenue, Port Monmouth, New Jersey.
Shari Nott was never arrested. She died on October 16, 2024 — ejected from her vehicle in a rollover crash in Mason County that ended with the car catching fire — while a federal arrest warrant was outstanding. According to the Mason County Sheriff’s Office and local media reports, the crash was high speed and unsurvivable. She was wanted by United States Marshals at the time of her death.
The contractors she stole from found out about it on Foreclosurepedia, like everyone else.
What the Creditor List Tells Us
The claims register in this case is a catalogue of the American working class in the mortgage field services industry. Ten of those claims — numbers 118 through 127 — were expunged entirely by court order in August 2022. RCR1, Ray Consulting, Herbruck Enterprises, Edward Heaser, Jerrys Property Management, Barbara Magnus, Nile Property Solutions, Agroh Ventures, Western Field Inspections, and K.C. Field Services. These were real people and real businesses. They performed real work on real properties. The court erased their claims from the distribution pool entirely. L&Y Services withdrew Claim 86 voluntarily in January 2022. That is what exhaustion looks like when it wears a legal caption.
What was once a storage locker — briefly identified as a potential asset of the estate — was eventually abandoned by the trustee without recovery; however, with the billing of hours assessed against the victims. Each adversary proceeding has quietly closed. The only asset of substance in this entire eight-year proceeding was a home sale held in escrow by Oglensky’s personal attorneys, beyond the trustee’s reach, disbursed to no one it appears. All with the billing against the victims.
A Zombie Case That Feeds the Professionals
The court authorized destruction of NFN’s records in June 2025. The last substantive docket entries — Rule 9019 settlement motions involving entities called Property Management Inc. and George Washington University — were entered in July and August 2025. After that, silence. The case is not closed. No final distribution order appears on the public docket. No disbursement to unsecured creditors has been announced. The professionals have been paid. The insiders have been settled. The principal is dead. The owner died in a crash. And the docket simply goes quiet.
Many observers now believe this is one of the longest-running bankruptcy proceedings in New Jersey history. What began as a pathway to justice has become what petitioners themselves describe as a zombie case — a self-sustaining machine that feeds the professionals managing the estate while draining the people it was supposed to protect. The years-before documentation of detailed lawyer hours has disappeared from the docket entirely. The billing continues at levels so extreme that the line items themselves have been obscured from public view.
Not one of the original petitioners has received compensation. Not one has been granted a meaningful discussion with the trustee about resolution. The communication they receive is an endless stream of new filings, each one generating more fees, each one consuming more time, each one moving the horizon of justice slightly further away.
The Institutions That Enabled This
Foreclosurepedia has covered the mortgage field services industry for fifteen years. We covered NFN when it was operational. We documented the non-payment patterns before the involuntary petition was filed. We documented the rate compression, the work order inflation, the independent contractor classification that allowed NFN to pocket servicer billing while transferring every cost and every risk downward to the people doing the work. We covered the petition in 2018, the Chapter 11 attempt, the conversion to Chapter 7, the adversary proceedings, and the contempt order against Nott. We are covering the aftermath now because the people who got hurt deserve a publication that does not forget them.
Firms like Reverse Mortgage Solutions, and the broader ecosystem of servicers and GSE clients that routed volume through NFN, used Labor as an input and disclaimed responsibility for what happened to it. HUD approved platforms that contracted with NFN and has never investigated the contractor payment practices of those platforms. Fannie Mae has never audited the sub-vendor payment chains of its field services contractors. The CFPB has never produced a formal enforcement action addressing contractor non-payment as a systemic servicer compliance failure, despite servicers setting the rates and approving the platforms. NAMFS held a conference in 2026 with thirteen exhibitors and two half-days of programming where no one mentioned fuel surcharges, no one mentioned labor conditions, and no one mentioned NFN. They never mention NFN. Their membership includes the order mills and servicers who built the system that produced NFN and profited from it, and the association has never once placed the interests of field labor above the interests of the platforms that pay its dues.
A Formal Call for Federal Investigation
The NFN case, Petition No. 18-16859-CMG in the District of New Jersey, has been active for more than eight years. The Chapter 7 phase alone exceeds six years. Professional fees paid from the estate likely exceed millions of dollars. The adversary proceedings produced settlements whose terms are invisible to the public. The CEO died fleeing a federal arrest warrant. A co-owner died in a separate crash before facing civil accountability. Family members who received fraudulent transfers settled on undisclosed terms. And the contractors who brought this case, who paid their own legal costs, who drained their savings and shuttered their businesses, have received nothing.
Foreclosurepedia is formally calling on the United States Department of Justice, the Office of the U.S. Trustee for the District of New Jersey, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency to examine the full record of this case. We are calling for a formal inquiry into whether the insider adversary proceeding settlements were arms-length transactions supervised with appropriate rigor. We are calling for scrutiny of the length of this proceeding and whether the professional fee structure served anyone’s interests other than the professionals billing it. We are calling for an examination of whether the contractor creditor class was adequately protected throughout.
And we are asking one question the docket itself cannot answer: who, specifically, was made whole for the contractors who were not.
Foreclosurepedia has stood by Labor for fifteen years without institutional backing, without government grants, without advertising revenue from the firms we cover critically. We have done so because it is the right thing to do. The NFN bankruptcy is proof — eight years of documented proof — of what happens when every other institution in the chain decides it is not their problem.
Foreclosurepedia is an independent investigative publication covering the mortgage field services and property preservation industry. Court records cited in this article are drawn from PACER docket 18-16859-CMG, United States Bankruptcy Court, District of New Jersey, and from court orders and reporting on file with Foreclosurepedia.
