Tag Archives: Mortgage Fraud

A Manhattan real estate attorney was sentenced to 51 months in prison for his role in a $9 million mortgage fraud scheme, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara announced Friday. According to the indictment and statements made in court proceedings, Eric Finger and his co-conspirators used "straw buyers" to fraudulently obtain mortgages from lenders.

Denver resident, 32-year-old Vicki Dillard Crowe was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison followed by three years of supervised release and a restitution payment of $2.4 million for mortgage fraud.

Federal officials jointly announced Tuesday the results of the Distressed Homeowner Initiative, which is the first nationwide effort focusing on fraud schemes that targets struggling homeowners. Their efforts so far have led to 530 criminal defendants (including 172 executives) being charged in 285 federal criminal indictments. The cases involved more than 73,000 homeowner victims, and losses are estimated to be in excess of $1 billion.

Mortgage fraud reports dropped year-over-year by more than 40 percent in the second quarter even as total suspicious activity rose, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) reported in a release. The network revealed 17,476 filers submitted mortgage loan fraud (MLF) suspicious activity reports (SARs) in the year's second quarter, a 41 percent drop from 29,558 reports during the same period in 2011. Reports related to MLF made up an 8 percent share of all SAR reports.

Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney has seemed particularly enthusiastic about discussing housing on the national stage, but Wednesday's debates saw a brief skirmish between the two candidates about regulation for the mortgage industry. The fleeting exchange on banking and mortgage regulation comes at an apt time, as New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman filed a lawsuit earlier in the week against JPMorgan Chase over mortgage securities fraud committed by a former Bear Stearns unit.

Wall Street took notice as the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities (RMBS) Working Group fired its first shot against a major financial institution.

Alan David Tikal of Brentwood, California, was arrested at his home for a complaint that he scammed more than 1,000 homeowners out of millions of dollars in a fraudulent foreclosure rescue scheme. He allegedly convinced homeowners that he could work out their mortgage debt and replace it was a lower debt to his own company, KATN Trust. Having been instructed to ignore all correspondence from their original lenders, victims paid thousands of dollars in upfront fees and then made regular payments on their new loans.

The most recent Mortgage Litigation Index showed that legal activity in the industry slowed its pace between the final quarter of 2011 and the opening quarter of 2012. According to figures from the first-quarter of the year, the number of total lawsuits dropped from 244 to 216 between quarters. However, the index indicated that while case activity declined on a quarter-to-quarter basis, legal action was up year-over-year, with litigation related to compliance, loan titles, and whistleblower action displaying especially strong increases.

Federal agents arrested 10 defendants who worked at a Rancho Cucamonga, California-based business accused of offering false loan modification programs to homeowners, SIGTARP announced Wednesday. Those taken into custody are among 11 defendants named in a federal indictment following a joint investigation by SIGTARP, the FBI, IRS├â┬ó├óÔÇÜ┬¼├óÔÇ×┬ó Criminal Investigations division, the United States Postal Inspection Service, and FHFA.

While fraud in the financial services sector declined year-over-year from April through June, mortgage fraud increased, according to the latest report from Experian, a global information services company based in London. Thirty-nine out of every 10,000 mortgage applications were fraudulent during the April to June period, up from 32 out of 10,000 in the same period last year, according to Experian. Mortgage fraud far outpaced savings account fraud.