At the end of the day, I'm not sure if this guy was trying to scam me or was woefully misinformed and/or crazy. He kept trying to insist that when you put money into escrow to buy a house, it can be used by the seller, that it is in any way safe/wise to take a (third or fourth position) lien on a house that the owner is using bankruptcy to avoid foreclosure on, and that I initially was going to give him $180k for his place when I never even floated the idea of more than $140k.
He also tried to get me to give him a loan to get stuff out of storage, including guitars worth $160k+, "Tiffany lamps" worth $30k+ each and things like that. As I have no expertise with guitars or Tiffany lamps, I said that I'm not interested in them, and even if I was, I have no way of knowing if he has them in storage or that they will sell for anything close to what he claimed they will.
The last time we spoke over the phone, I ended up muting my end of the conversation and just shaking my head as, for over fifteen minutes, he ranted against capitalism and how Buddha wasn't really fat and things like that.
I'm going to end up calling the mortgage holder and telling them that if they do succeed in foreclosing on him and need a buyer for the property, to let me know.
Otherwise, back to the old drawing board, I guess.