File 024 | They Knew My Home Was at Risk

For almost three years, Viral Solutions supported MSCG while I struggled to protect my own home. The documentary record shows that MSCG leadership knew what was happening before my home went to auction.

There is a question I asked during a recorded MSCG meeting that I never imagined would become literal:

“Do I have to lose my house to prove that I support Michigan Secure Capital Group?”

I wasn’t being dramatic.

By then, my home was already at risk.

MSCG’s leadership knew it.

And I was still working.

This Story Begins on October 1, 2023

Viral Solutions’ relationship with MSCG did not begin on October 1, 2023.

The obligation to pay did.

Before October 1, Viral Solutions had already provided substantial time, agency resources and professional services in support of MSCG.

I provided that early work voluntarily, without an expectation that Viral Solutions would be compensated for those earlier hours.

I was helping someone I considered a friend.

That distinction matters.

As October approached, Bob Morales told me that MSCG would transition into a paying Viral Solutions client effective October 1, 2023, provided certain changes occurred within Viral Solutions.

Those conditions were satisfied immediately before the agreed start date.

October 1 therefore marked a clear change in the relationship.

What had previously been voluntarily provided time and agency support became a paying commercial engagement.

From that date forward, Viral Solutions continued providing marketing, branding, websites, hosting, digital infrastructure, systems, administration and operational support for MSCG.

That is why Viral Solutions’ accounting of the unpaid engagement begins on October 1, 2023.

It does not attempt to retroactively charge MSCG for the work I had previously chosen to provide without expectation of compensation.

The accounting begins when the agreement to pay began.

I Continued Funding the Company That Was Supposed to Be Paying Mine

What followed was not a short-term project.

For almost three years, Viral Solutions continued providing services, resources and infrastructure used by MSCG.

The documentary history preserved elsewhere on this site shows the continuing branding, website administration, hosting, marketing and digital-infrastructure work performed through Viral Solutions. It also documents the invoices and expenses associated with that work.

Those obligations accumulated while the work continued.

At the same time, my own financial position deteriorated.

That is an important part of this story.

I was funding and supporting MSCG’s marketing operation while increasingly struggling to fund my own life.

Readers of File 007 | Surviving on Utilities already know where that eventually led.

Utilities.

Food.

Housing.

Medication for my dog.

Basic survival.

And throughout it, I kept working.

Forbearance Was Supposed to Buy Time

Eventually, my mortgage became another casualty of waiting.

I placed my home into forbearance on Bob’s recommendation because I was not receiving enough money to keep the mortgage current.

Forbearance was never a solution.

It was time.

I relied on repeated representations that MSCG’s financial situation was temporary and that funding and payment were coming.

I kept working because I believed that.

And the house waited with me.

During this period, Bob did provide limited money toward certain expenses. MSCG’s infrastructure costs were paid at various points. Some of my utilities and basic living expenses were covered while I continued working.

That needs to be understood accurately.

Paying some of the ongoing expenses required to keep MSCG’s own infrastructure operating was not compensation to Viral Solutions for the company that built, funded and maintained that infrastructure.

And helping me keep utilities connected while I continued working did not compensate Viral Solutions for the services, expenses and support it continued to provide.

Nor did it solve the mortgage.

It bought time.

Eventually, the time ran out.

November 2025: Put It in the Budget

By November 2025, compensation was not being treated as some undefined future concept.

Bob formally asked the C-suite executives to prepare departmental budgets, including how we wanted to receive our compensation.

I complied.

My submission included my executive compensation and the existing Viral Solutions obligations.

The supporting documentation showed what Viral Solutions had already provided and what remained outstanding. I made clear that the existing Viral Solutions obligations needed to be resolved as part of moving into the new compensation structure.

These were not numbers reconstructed years later.

They were presented to Bob at the time.

My executive compensation was separate from the agency obligations owed to Viral Solutions.

Then came the November 11 executive meeting.

Bob did not respond by telling us that the budgets were too high.

He said:

“I bumped all of your budgets up. Budgets need to go up.”

He discussed the need to stop operating on artificially small budgets and illustrated his point by suggesting that a $500,000 budget might actually need to be $2 million.

The timing matters.

The company was discussing larger budgets.

My compensation had been submitted.

Viral Solutions’ existing obligations had been documented.

And within weeks, I would be asking whether I could keep my house.

My Forbearance Was Ending

By late November, the temporary protection on my home was ending.

On November 25, I made the housing problem explicit.

The following day, I told Bob that I needed a clear answer because I had to speak with Rocket Mortgage.

His response included a description of his own purported experience with mortgage forbearance.

Bob wrote that he had been in forbearance for 18 months and that afterward his interest rate had been reduced to accommodate what he could afford.

He specifically identified the lender as Rocket Mortgage.

I subsequently questioned the chronology of that account in writing to Jerry Rizqallah. I could not reconcile Bob’s description with the history I was able to establish, and I documented that concern contemporaneously.

I do not need to determine here why Bob’s account appeared inconsistent.

What matters to this File is why we were having that conversation at all.

My forbearance was ending.

I needed to know whether I was finally going to receive enough of the compensation and documented obligations owed to me and Viral Solutions to protect my home.

I was not asking MSCG to assume my mortgage.

I was not asking for charity.

I was asking to be paid so that I could pay it myself.

January 6, 2026: They Heard It Directly

By January, this could no longer be characterized as a future concern.

I told MSCG’s leadership what my financial life had become.

I explained that I had virtually no money.

I described surviving on utilities and minimal living expenses.

I explained that I was protecting the small amount of money remaining in my account because it represented months of medication for my dog.

And I explained why I was in that position:

“I put all my money into my company based on Bob guaranteeing that he would be paying me and that the funding would come.”

The conversation turned directly to Viral Solutions.

I was asked whether invoices existed.

They did.

I was asked whether Bob had disputed them.

He had not.

I explained that the amounts had been included with the material submitted during the budget process.

I also recalled during that discussion that Bob had previously indicated that marketing was something he wanted to address first.

I was sitting in front of MSCG leadership explaining what years of continuing to fund and support MSCG had done to me financially.

Then the conversation took another extraordinary turn.

Bob Had Apparently Told Jerry He Bought Viral Solutions

During that January 6 meeting, Jerry challenged what I was telling him and said he needed to verify the situation with Bob.

Then he explained why.

According to Jerry, Bob had told him that he had purchased Viral Solutions.

Bob had previously expressed an intention to purchase Viral Solutions.

He never did.

There was no completed acquisition.

There was no transfer of ownership.

Viral Solutions remained my company.

Its assets remained its assets.

Its infrastructure remained its infrastructure.

And the infrastructure and intellectual property created through Viral Solutions remained—and continues to remain—owned by Viral Solutions.

Nothing was transferred to Bob Morales/Smith, MSCG or its affiliated companies.

Bob’s payment of certain ongoing infrastructure expenses and some of my utilities while I continued working did not constitute the purchase of Viral Solutions.

Nor could saying that Viral Solutions had been purchased erase the documented obligations arising from the services it had already provided.

Bob had talked about buying Viral Solutions.

He never did.

So there I was, trying to explain how years of supporting MSCG had contributed to a financial crisis threatening my home, while simultaneously having to establish something even more fundamental:

I still owned the company that had done the work.

“Do I Have to Lose My House?”

That is the context in which I asked a question that is difficult for me to read today:

“Do I have to lose my house to prove that I support Michigan Secure Capital Group?”

Consider what had already happened by that point.

I had provided voluntary assistance before the paying relationship began.

Viral Solutions had provided paid services beginning October 1, 2023.

I had continued funding marketing and infrastructure.

The invoices existed.

The accounting existed.

The budget existed.

The compensation structure existed.

I had placed my mortgage into forbearance.

I had continued working while surviving on minimal payments and basic expenses.

And now I was sitting in a meeting telling MSCG’s leadership that I could lose my home.

I wasn’t speaking hypothetically.

I wasn’t asking for sympathy.

I was telling them what was happening.

And I kept working.

January 13: I Put It in Writing Again

One week later, I documented the situation directly to Jerry and Steve.

I explained that I had entered forbearance after becoming three months behind on my mortgage during a period in which MSCG was not paying me enough to survive.

I explained my reliance on Bob’s repeated representations that the situation was temporary.

I documented the services and resources Viral Solutions had carried.

I offered to provide my current Rocket Mortgage documentation.

And I described the position I had reached after continuing to wait.

MSCG leadership therefore had more than a verbal warning.

They had it in writing.

Jerry Asked Me for the Mortgage Balance

The warnings did not end there.

Jerry later called me about the house.

During that call, he had me log into my Rocket Mortgage account and give him the balance.

This was no longer a general conversation about whether I was experiencing financial difficulty.

Jerry knew the amount because he had me retrieve it directly from the mortgage account.

He told me:

“You are not going to lose the house.”

I wanted desperately to believe him.

During that same period, Jerry told me that he had just received a $10 million grant for his hospital.

I include that fact for context, not because Jerry, his hospital or that grant had any obligation to pay my mortgage.

They did not.

The significance is the conversation itself.

I was telling an MSCG executive that my home was in immediate danger.

He had me obtain the actual mortgage balance.

He told me I was not going to lose the house.

And I continued believing that the commitments made to me and Viral Solutions would finally be honored in time.

They were not.

Then My House Went to Auction

Eventually, this stopped being a discussion about what might happen.

The foreclosure process advanced.

Another formal notice went to Jerry and members of the executive team.

And ultimately:

My house went up for auction.

That distinction matters.

This wasn’t merely a delinquent mortgage.

It wasn’t merely a warning letter.

It wasn’t merely a possibility that I might someday lose my home.

My home actually reached the auction process.

At essentially the same time, Viral Solutions was still supporting MSCG’s digital infrastructure.

The company I owned was still helping maintain their infrastructure while I was losing mine.

I sometimes wonder what else I could possibly have said.

They had the invoices.

They had the accounting.

They had the budget.

They knew about the forbearance.

They knew what my financial condition had become.

They heard me explain it directly.

They received it again in writing.

Jerry had me log into Rocket Mortgage and give him the balance.

And he had told me:

“You are not going to lose the house.”

Before any of that, I had already asked:

“Do I have to lose my house to prove that I support Michigan Secure Capital Group?”

In My Opinion, My House Became Leverage

What happened next changed how I understood everything that had happened before it.

For approximately two and a half years, Viral Solutions had built and maintained the websites, hosting, Google Business assets, digital infrastructure and other systems MSCG had been using.

Those assets had value.

They also belonged to or remained under the control of Viral Solutions.

Viral Solutions had never been sold.

Those assets had not been transferred to MSCG.

By this point, Viral Solutions’ documented outstanding bill was approximately $3 million.

My immediate mortgage crisis, by comparison, was approximately $22,000.

And MSCG leadership knew about both.

Jerry had personally called me, had me log into my Rocket Mortgage account and give him the balance.

He had told me:

“You are not going to lose the house.”

Then came the issue of turning over the Viral Solutions accounts and assets.

I refused.

I would not hand over the websites, hosting, Google Business assets and other Viral Solutions-controlled infrastructure we had spent approximately two and a half years building while millions of dollars in documented obligations remained unpaid.

After I refused to turn those assets over, communication stopped.

I was ghosted.

Viral Solutions continues to invoice the outstanding obligations.

I cannot establish what was in another person’s mind.

I can document what happened.

And I can explain the conclusion I reached from it.

In my opinion, the risk to my home was being used as leverage to obtain Viral Solutions’ assets.

From where I stood, the proposition had effectively become this:

Give up the Viral Solutions assets we had spent two and a half years building, while approximately $3 million remained outstanding, in the context of a roughly $22,000 mortgage crisis that MSCG leadership knew could cost me my home.

Put another way, I believed I was being pressured to surrender assets associated with an approximately $3 million documented obligation at a moment when roughly $22,000 could help protect my house.

I would not do it.

If that meant communication stopped, it stopped.

If that meant Viral Solutions had to continue invoicing, it would continue invoicing.

But I was not going to allow the threat of losing my home to become the mechanism by which Viral Solutions surrendered assets it had spent years building.

My house was at risk. Viral Solutions was not for sale for $22,000.

He Had Been Welcome in My Home

There is something else about this story that no mortgage statement, invoice or foreclosure document can show.

Bob knew my home.

He had been a welcome guest there.

We had spent hours around my table over charcuterie, wine and cocktails, talking about business, life and the future.

He had stayed in my guest room several times.

He wasn’t someone who knew my house as an address on a document.

He had eaten there.

He had slept there.

He had been welcomed there as my friend.
He still holds an access card to the guard gate.

And that is part of what makes what happened so difficult for me to reconcile.

This wasn’t simply a business executive being told that someone working with his company was having trouble paying a mortgage.

Bob knew the home I was trying to save.

He knew what it meant to me because he had been part of the life that happened inside it.

He had always been welcome.

There was a time when I would never have imagined writing an article like this about him.

Because before the invoices, the budgets, the unanswered obligations, the foreclosure and the fight over Viral Solutions’ assets—

Bob used to be my friend.

I Got an Answer I Never Wanted

Eventually, the question I had asked months earlier stopped being rhetorical.

I lost the house.

That sentence remains difficult for me to write.

Because by then, the house wasn’t the first thing I had lost.

I had already lost my company as I had known it.

I had lost the team I had spent years building.

I had watched the business I built become smaller and smaller as I redirected its resources, its people and eventually much of my own financial security toward supporting MSCG and waiting for commitments I believed would be honored.

People who had worked beside me were gone.

The agency I had built was no longer the company it had once been.

My financial reserves were gone.

And still, I kept trying to hold onto the one thing that remained:

my home.

It was where I lived with Monet and Galileo.

It was where friends had gathered around my table.

It was where Bob himself had eaten, stayed and been welcomed as a friend.

It was the place I thought I could still save.

And then I lost that too.

Throughout the deterioration that ultimately led there, I continued working.

That may be the part I struggle with most.

I kept working.

I kept believing that eventually the commitments would be honored.

I kept thinking the next funding event, the next promised payment, the next meeting or the next deadline would finally change things.

Even after Jerry told me:

“You are not going to lose the house.”

Until there was no more time.

They Knew

This File isn’t published to ask anyone for sympathy.

It is published because chronology matters.

A foreclosure document shows an outcome.

An auction shows an outcome.

Neither, standing alone, shows everything that happened before it.

This record does.

It shows why October 1, 2023 matters.

It shows the work.

It shows the infrastructure.

It shows the invoices and accounting.

It shows the budget process.

It shows the compensation discussions.

It shows the forbearance.

It shows the warnings.

It shows the January meeting.

It shows the written notice.

It shows Jerry asking me to obtain the actual Rocket Mortgage balance.

It shows his assurance that I would not lose the house.

It shows my house going to auction.

And it shows that MSCG leadership knew my home was at risk before that risk became reality.

Months before losing it, I asked:

“Do I have to lose my house to prove that I support Michigan Secure Capital Group?”

I should never have had to find out.

The Record Continues

The broader financial consequences are documented in File 007 | Surviving on Utilities.

The history of Viral Solutions’ branding, websites, marketing and digital infrastructure work is documented in File 002 | Michigan Secure Capital Group Branding Timeline.

Other Files document the representations, work product, corporate communications and events surrounding this relationship.

I encourage readers to examine those records rather than simply accept my conclusions.

MSCG and affiliated businesses have publicly spoken about integrity, trust, accountability and fraud prevention.

Those principles cannot mean much if they apply only to other people.

Accountability begins at home.

The opportunity to resolve the outstanding matters through good-faith negotiation has not disappeared.

But that window is closing.

I waited almost three years for commitments to become reality.

I will not wait quietly anymore.