I hear there are a lot of private lending scams out there.  

We were very very careful to make sure this wouldn't happen because of all the interest in the property and it's common for people to pull these shenanigans to get a property under contract and accepted for a ridiculous price and then later back out and reduce the offer for the "appraised value" so we wrote a special clause into our counter proposal.On top of all this the roofer that I had hired took my $1k and ran off with the material money and also hired and scammed another roofing company that tore off the existing roof.

So, you get a shady tenant who games the system, cheats landlords as a practice, and a company that helps them with the scam.

Reach out to them to get copies.I think the IRS help companies are scams so do not try to go that route.  

Back in 2012 someone went on ripoff report and said I was a scam artist.

but lets see what others think there are always crooks out there that are happy to scam the system like you want to do@?

That's because it can be construed as taking advantage of their knowledge as an agent with an unsuspecting seller.

The owner of the house died, the house is criminally underwater, deed transferred to unsuspecting ex-wife of owner and she plans on letting it foreclose since ex-wife thought she had nothing to do with this house any longer.  

or should I chalk this up as a potential scam He has a good concept for a funding program for renovation and flipping the property which is why I was wondering if anyone has done business with him.

One issue is the bad folks out there that will buy these terrible properties and them sell them to un suspecting forigners who then get blamed for not maintaining their props.. when in fact they got swindled... :) but when your talking about 20 to 30k houses being over priced and no value then your talking about the worse of the worse in housing stock.. and I am sure these are ghetto type locations. or war zones.