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A refinancing gone wrong turned Ed and Lisa Kivel from consumers in search of the best mortgage interest rate to consumer activists in search of justice. When the Kivels realized that Minnesota law gave them little recourse from a lender they consider unscrupulous, they set about changing it.

They spent three years and more than $25,000 sharing their story of inflated mortgages, lies and falsified documents with anyone who would listen. In that time, their crusade has grown from a complaint filed with the Commerce Department to hours of testifying at the Legislature.

The fruits of their fight -- a bill making mortgage fraud a punishable crime and allowing Minnesotans like the Kivels to pursue legal action -- is making its way through the House and Senate. It is one of three predatory-lending bills before the Legislature this year, the first of which, a bill banning high-risk mortgages and requiring mortgage brokers to confirm that borrowers can afford their loans, was signed by Gov. Tim Pawlenty on Friday.

A crusade is born

The trouble began when Ed Kivel, 44, noticed that the loan amount for their Baytown Township home, outside of Stillwater, was $4,500 higher than they'd asked for, an increase without authorization or explanation.

"We didn't need any money out of it at all," said Kivel, who was refinancing in 2004 to take advantage of historically low interest rates.

When he asked the WealthSpring Mortgage broker to change the loan amount back to $325,000, the broker said the loan was turned down because of hazardous materials in their soil discovered during an appraisal. (No such appraisal ever has surfaced, and the state Health Department, in a letter to the broker, refuted those claims.)

Then came evidence that lender ABN Amro approved the loan only to later deny it at the broker's request.

Kivel believes that once he noticed the inflated loan amount, the broker -- who he suspects of planning to pocket the extra cash -- was trying to get out of the loan. "I think it speaks to the old adage 'how do you steal a million dollars without getting caught?' " Kivel said. "Steal a dollar from a million people."

An engineer at 3M, Kivel, with the help of his wife, Lisa, gathered documents in order to prove their case. Their 3,000 pages of research fill an office in their home. They sent copies of their investigation and their story to legislators, the media, to anyone who would listen. They even enlisted their youngest of three children, Shauna, now 12, to help; her brother and sister are in college.

The maze of justice

Why didn't the Kivels just walk away?

During the few weeks they realized the loan wasn't going to go through, interest rates had risen sharply -- from 4.75 percent to more than 5.5 percent -- higher than the rate on their original loan.

That stung, but for the Kivels, who have excellent credit and could have refinanced anywhere, it was no longer about money. "People are losing their houses" because of shoddy mortgage deals, Ed Kivel said. "It's just not right." His family's experience shows that predatory lending doesn't just happen to low-income or financially strapped individuals. Having the means and the fortitude, they fought for change.

First, they filed a complaint through the Department of Commerce.

Kivel said that after sending "tons" of documents to the department over several months, his calls went unanswered and he never received a progress report. (The department recently reopened his case.) Frustrated, they hired a lawyer and sued WealthSpring, convinced a binder of documents they considered damning would make a rock-solid case.

They lost.

"The case was dismissed as not having any standing or legitimacy," said Dick Anderson, an executive vice president for WealthSpring Mortgage, who wouldn't discuss substantive issues in the suit.