In the depths of the Great Recession, a cancer nurse, a car dealership worker, and an insurance fraud specialist helped uncover the largest consumer crime in American history—a scandal that implicated dozens of major executives on Wall Street. They called it foreclosure fraud: millions of families were kicked out of their homes based on false evidence by mortgage companies that had no legal right to foreclose.

Lisa Epstein, Michael Redman, and Lynn Szymoniak did not work in government or law enforcement. They had no history of anticorporate activism. Instead they were all foreclosure victims, and while struggling with their shame and isolation they committed a revolutionary act: closely reading their mortgage documents, discovering the deceit behind them, and building a movement to expose it.

In Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud, Fiscal Timescolumnist David Dayen recounts how these ordinary Floridians challenged the most powerful institutions in America armed only with the truth—and for a brief moment they brought the corrupt financial industry to its knees.

David Dayen is a contributing writer to Salon and a weekly columnist for the Fiscal Times, and he writes for publications including the New Republic, the American Prospect, the Guardian, Vice, the Intercept, and the Huffington Post. He lives in Los Angeles. This is his first book.