I Thought I Was Being Evicted… Found Out That I Never Had A Lease In The First Place. What Now?

So I (20M) am looking for advice for a situation in which I was looking for housing desperately and found someone on FB Marketplace. Was scared of getting scammed, but I meet with them a couple times, we figure out the arrangement and eventually I sign the lease. This is in the state of Illinois (which matters later I believe), and we sign 6 people onto the lease in our unit.

Now I didn’t realize at the time but that was definitely the first big red flag, as I was told later that only 4 non-related persons can be signed onto a single unit. Still I continued; I moved from home and have no family in the state and nowhere to go, so I just went forward with the deal. In between this time, our toilet stops up, then literally explodes (like, the porcelain cracked from the high pressure cause the landlord told us to pour hot water down the toilet which in hindsight was dumb). He takes everyone’s security deposit because of this, and I seek advice from my sister who says that it seems the way he’s going about it is like he doesn’t ACTUALLY know what he’s doing, since we weren’t at fault for the situation.

Fast forward around 2 months and I’m out of a job, I’m looking for ways to not be evicted but I realize my best option is to just go through the lawsuit and receive assistance through the CBRA (Court Based Rental Assistance) program. For this to happen though of course we have to go through a legal eviction which he doesn’t seem to want to do. He keeps trying to start verbal altercations and I realize he’s trying to scare me into moving out myself. I try to explain to him that I’m looking for assistance and he essentially calls me stupid for wanting to do things the legal way (I’m a black 20 year old with no family in this part of the country, I promise you I’m not a fan of the legal system).

He gives me 2 verbal 5 day notices before finally giving a written one; I wait it out expecting the lawsuit, but at the end of that he just comes and curses me out trying to negotiate me leaving again. At this point I KNOW something is up and seek free legal advice in which I’m told about the amount of tenants. I came to the conclusion then that there must have been 4 legal tenants and two people who were “tacked on” if that makes sense. I realize that in this situation he can’t legally evict me because I’m not a tenant, and so I figured at this point that I have the leverage to maybe negotiate something, and the person I spoke to agreed.

He comes to me to negotiate again, and I ask him why he isn’t filing the lawsuit. He says he can pay me to move out. I ask him the budget and time, he says “I can give you until next Saturday, I can give you 500 cash.”

MY SECURITY DEPOSIT FOR THIS PLCE WAS 800 AND MY RENT IS ~650

I obviously decline and start pressuring him with the legality of the situation, where he ends up revealing that NONE of us are tenants. That he has no legal tenants. He offers me the deal again and I say “I’ll see what I can do” and he tries to get me to sign on it. I obviously say “hell no my mother raised me better than that”, And so I’m now at a point where I’m like, what do I do? I’m thinking of just attempting to live here rent free for the rest of my time here, or to get what I’ve paid refunded. Thing is, I do have 5 other roommates that I don’t wanna make homeless if this has to be escalated.

I don’t exactly know what the ramifications of escalating this is. Is he even fully qualified to be a landlord? He isn’t paying taxes on my rent so is this not fraud of some kind? There are 3 units so how would it work for the other people in the building? He got me to sign a lease in which he then claimed to my other roommates was lost, how does the false lease interact with the fact that I have paid him rent in accordance to a fraudulent contract (I kept a copy of it digitally thankfully but yeah)?

I’m just looking for advice and where to go with this, the options I may have and what to consider. In the back of my mind, I’m wondering if I could be evicted as a squatter but he deceived me into thinking I was a tenant so how would that work? Overall a messy and confusing situation, and as a 20 year old who tries to know his rights but knows he doesn’t have any expertise, this seems like the place to be. Thank you!!!!

I’m not on Reddit much so idrk how this goes but TLDR: Breadcrumbs lead to finding out I don’t have a lease. What do I do now?