My apologies for the length of this post but there was an interesting joint announcement today from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that bears (no pun intended) commenting on. According to a press release titled “More Than 400 Defendants Charged for Roles in Mortgage Fraud Schemes as Part of Operation “Malicious Mortgage”,” from March 1st of this year until yesterday (June 18), a coordinated effort between the two agencies resulted in 144 mortgage fraud cases being cracked and 406 defendants being charged with related crimes.

On the surface, this looks like very big news, and as one would suspect, almost every media outlet in the country is covering the story. But when you really stop to think about it, sadly, the numbers touted in today’s announcement amount to very little. Certainly, every real estate and mortgage fraud-related arrest helps, but when you consider that there were 110 days between March 1st and yesterday, Operation Malicious Mortgage netted less than two real estate and mortgage fraud scams per day (or to be more precise, 1.30909091 scams per day for each day of the 110-day effort). I don’t know about anyone else, but less than two real estate and mortgage fraud-related scams being shut down per day–when by one estimate, more than 75% of all home loans closed leading up to the current mortgage meltdown contained some level of fraud–isn’t really that big of a deal.

But Ralph, you’ll say, 406 people who were committing these horrible crimes are no longer in the business of intentionally destroying the American dream of homeownership (which is like 3.69 arrests per day); doesn’t count for something?

Of course it does… it does count for something… it counts for what’s already happening across the country in terms of arrest volume for real estate and mortgage fraud-related crimes, and it’s still not enough to make much of a difference. By my own estimate, if I were to only report real estate and mortgage fraud-related arrests or indictments here on FlippingFrenzy.com (which I don’t because this site is about more than just indictments and arrests), and we were to go back and count the number of scams that were shut down (or the number of people arrested or indicted), I could come up with a pretty sexy number to rival that which the DOJ and FBI came out with today. In the grand scheme of things, today’s announcement is actually a little bit disappointing.

Of more interest to me than the 144 mortgage fraud cases being cracked and the 406 defendants being charged with related crimes, was this (from the same press release and summarized by Kate Kelly of The Wall Street Journal):

A federal grand jury in Brooklyn, N.Y., indicted two former Bear Stearns Cos. hedge-fund managers, alleging they misled investors when their fund was in peril, lied about their financial interest in the portfolios and destroyed evidence in the investigation. The high-profile criminal case, along with a parallel civil securities-fraud action by the Securities and Exchange Commission, marks the first criminal securities-fraud charges stemming from the mortgage-market crisis. The 27-page indictment paints a picture of the scramble by the managers, Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, to keep their hedge funds alive…

Everyone, including the FBI, likes to talk about how there are two types of real estate and mortgage fraud… Fraud for Housing and Fraud for Profit. Well, what about Fraud for Wall Street?

Read the following (from the Associated Press’ Tom Hays), and tell me if you too can spot the Fraud for Wall Street:

2 charged on Wall Street in mortgage meltdown
By TOM HAYS

NEW YORK (AP) — Two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers were hauled into jail Thursday and charged with lying to investors about the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, perhaps signaling the start of a wave of prosecutions arising from the housing meltdown.

Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin were accused of encouraging investors to stay in their hedge funds, heavily exposed to subprime mortgages, even as they knew the credit market was in serious trouble.

They were indicted on conspiracy and fraud counts, the first criminal charges to hit Wall Street in the housing market meltdown.

The eventual implosion of their two hedge funds cost investors $1.8 billion and started the domino effect that led the demise of Bear Stearns itself, which barely avoided bankruptcy in a rescue buyout by JP Morgan Chase & Co.

“This is not about mismanagement of a hedge fund,” Mark Mershon, head of the New York FBI office, told reporters. “It is about premeditated lies to investors and lenders.”

The arrests came as the Justice Department in Washington announced the indictments of more than 400 players in the real-estate industry since March in a crackdown on mortgage fraud. Sixty were arrested on Wednesday alone.

That alleged fraud includes misstatement of income or assets, forged documents, inflated appraisals and misrepresentation of a buyer’s intent to occupy a property as a primary residence.
The Bear Stearns case against Cioffi and Tannin appears to be based heavily on a series of e-mails that reveal panic and disorder behind the scenes at the hedge fund as its investments began to slide.

“The subprime market looks pretty damn ugly,” Tannin wrote to Cioffi in April 2007. If Bear’s internal reports were accurate, Tannin suggested, “I think we should close the funds now,” and “the entire subprime market is toast.”

The situation became so dire that Cioffi pulled $2 million of his own cash from the fund, but the pair still told investors that they should stay in and that the outlook was good, prosecutors said.

Cioffi, 52, was arrested by FBI agents at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on Thursday morning, and Tannin, 46, was taken into custody outside his New Jersey home.

Both men pleaded not guilty at an afternoon arraignment and were released on bond. Each faces up to 20 years in prison. They left court with their wives and without speaking to reporters.

The mortgage market crisis “took the whole financial world by surprise,” said Cioffi’s attorney, Edward Little. “So our question is, why is Ralph Cioffi being charged in this case?” Tannin’s lawyer, Susan Brune, said he was “being made a scapegoat for a widespread market crisis. He looks forward to his acquittal.”

Legal experts said more Wall Street figures would probably be charged in the credit crisis, the latest front for white-collar prosecutors who brought — and in most cases won — high-profile cases earlier this decade after the fall of Enron.

“There is no doubt the government is always looking to go as high as they can,” said Bill Leone, a former U.S. Attorney in Colorado. “Any time you get losses into the billions, the likelihood that higher-level executives participated in decisions increases.”

Subprime mortgages were sold to people with less-than-ideal credit. Many of them began defaulting on their loans when the housing market fell and their introductory “teaser” interest rates shot up, making their payments unaffordable.

Because many of those mortgages were sliced and repackaged as securities that could be bought and sold, the mass defaults caused widespread pain among large U.S. banks.

The collapse of the two Bear Stearns funds is just a small part of the subprime crisis, which is still rippling through the economy.

Amid the fallout for banks, prominent CEOs have lost their jobs, including Citigroup Inc.’s Charles Prince, Merrill Lynch & Co.’s Stanley O’Neal and Bear Stearns Cos.’ own James Cayne, who was stripped of his CEO title.

Hedge funds cater to large investors and the very wealthy and use complex, speculative investing methods in hopes of winning enormous gains. They operate with little government supervision and have lately come under fire from regulators.

In the Bear case, the internal e-mails provide a window into the trouble that began to engulf the hedge funds in 2007.

The indictment describes a meeting of Cioffi, Tannin and two unnamed colleagues in which Cioffi confided the hedge funds had narrowly “averted disaster” in February 2007 — news that “led to a vodka toast to celebrate surviving the month.”

The complaint says Tannin expressed doubt about Cioffi’s management in an one e-mail last March to a third fund manager with only question marks in the subject line. The e-mail said, “Is Ralph doing what he should be doing right now?”

Around the same time, Cioffi wrote to a Bear Stearns economist: “I’m fearful of these markets. … As we discussed it may not be a meltdown for the general economy but in our world it will be. Wall Street will be hammered with lawsuits.”

Tannin and Cioffi were repeatedly telling investors and Bear Stearns brokers responsible for selling funds that the outlook was good.

In once instance, prosecutors said, Tannin encouraged an investor to add money to the fund and said he would do the same, but never did.

At the same time, prosecutors say, Cioffi pulled $2 million of his own money out of the fund, about a third of his stake, and put it into a separate fund without telling investors. He was charged with insider trading in addition to fraud.

The Bear Stearns hedge funds had more than $20 billion in assets before collapsing in June 2007. Just before the collapse, Cioffi fretted in an e-mail that “I’ve effectively washed a 30-year career down the drain” if he couldn’t turn things around, the indictment said.

The case demonstrates yet again how e-mail can trip up Wall Street executives.

Prosecutors used e-mail exchanges against former Credit Suisse Group banker Frank Quattrone and famed stock analysts Jack Grubman and Henry Blodget. But prosecutors struggled to win and maintain convictions in all of those cases.

Cioffi and Tannin have already been named in lawsuits brought last year by hedge fund investors who allege they were purposely misled.

The fortunes of Bear Stearns began to crumble around the same time that the fund collapsed, getting so bad that the Federal Reserve and JPMorgan had to intervene to save the once-mighty institution from bankruptcy earlier this year.

AP Business Writer Joe Bel Bruno contributed to this report.

As I told many of the reporters who called about today’s developments (including The Detroit News), what the popular media is finally getting around to reporting isn’t even the tip of the iceberg that sank the Titanic. While it’s true that today’s announcements are a step in the right direction, its also true that this nation’s real estate and mortgage fraud-related woes go much deeper than what Operation Malicious Mortgage has uncovered. Sadly, as I recently reported, our own Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, said just last week that the Justice Department, the FBI’s parent agency, won’t create a national task force to combat mortgage fraud as the government did with corporate crime after Enron. “This isn’t that kind of phenomenon,’’ Attorney General Mukasey says.

Hey, Mr. Attorney General… to paraphrase James Whitcomb Riley: If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks just like a duck, I would call it a duck.

If you are interested in the federal government’s handling of real estate and mortgage fraud prevention and prosecution, read “FBI Halts Some Cases to Investigate Mortgage Frauds,” by Bloomberg’s Robert Schmidt. If you don’t have time to read the entire article, here’s just what you need to know:

• The FBI, confronting a surge in mortgage fraud, has ordered more than two dozen of its field offices to stop probing certain financial crimes so agents can focus on real estate and mortgage fraud.
• Kenneth Kaiser, chief of the bureau’s criminal investigative division, issued this directive late last week on a video conference call with the heads of 26 FBI offices in areas where real estate fraud is out of control.
• An FBI spokesperson said the shift was made after an analysis of how agents are spending their time. Approximately 150 FBI agents were working on more than 1,300 real estate fraud cases before the directive was issued.
• The 26 FBI field offices were told to temporarily suspend opening new cases dealing with price fixing, mass marketing, wire fraud, mail fraud and environmental crimes. Current cases aren’t being dropped, the FBI spokesperson said.
• FBI field offices in Florida, Georgia, California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, New York, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Minnesota–all rated as real estate and mortgage fraud hot spots–are participating.
• “Diverting FBI resources to deal with cases of mortgage fraud is exactly what Chairwoman Mikulski wants to avoid,” Melissa Schwartz, a spokeswoman for U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski, who heads the appropriations subcommittee for the FBI, told Bloomberg late yesterday.
• The Attorney General of the United States, Michael Mukasey said last week that the Justice Department, the FBI’s parent agency, “won’t create a national task force to combat mortgage fraud as the government did with corporate crime after Enron. “This isn’t that kind of phenomenon,” he said.

For more on this developing story, read FBI Halts Some Cases to Investigate Mortgage Frauds.

Earlier today, the FBI released another new report detailing fraud in financial markets, including those related to real estate. The Financial Crimes Report for Fiscal Year 2007 covers corporate fraud, securities and commodities fraud, health care fraud, mortgage fraud, insurance fraud, mass marketing fraud, and asset forfeiture/money laundering.

As we know, financial crimes affect the economic security of all Americans, regardless of whether we feel safe and secure in our homes or not. Key findings presented in the new report include:

1. By of the end of Fiscal Year 2007, 529 corporate fraud cases were being pursued by the FBI, several of which involve losses to public investors that individually exceed $1 billion.
2. FBI securities and commodities fraud cases increased from 937 in 2003 to 1,217 in 2007, and resulted in $24 million in recoveries, $1.7 billion in restitution orders, and $202.7 million in fines in 2007.
3. Through 2007, the 2,493 health care fraud cases investigated by the FBI resulted in 839 indictments and 635 convictions of health care fraud criminals.
4. The 1,204 pending real estate and mortgage fraud cases in 2007 resulted in 321 indictments, 206 convictions, $595.9 million in restitution orders, and $21.8 million in recoveries.
5. The FBI investigated 548 money laundering cases in FY 2007, resulting in 141 indictments, 112 convictions, $66.9 million in restitution orders, $2.2 million in recoveries, and $11.4 million in fines.

Although there are many mortgage fraud schemes, the FBI says it is focusing the majority of its efforts on those perpetrated by real estate industry insiders. In the report, the FBI says it is engaged with the mortgage industry primarily in identifying fraud trends and educating the public. Some of the upwardly trending real estate and mortgage fraud schemes include:

• Equity skimming
• Property flipping
• Mortgage-related identity theft

Equity skimming is a tried and true method of committing real estate fraud. Today’s common equity skimming schemes involve the use of corporate shell companies, corporate identity theft, and the use or threat of bankruptcy/foreclosure to dupe homeowners and investors. Property flipping is nothing new; however, once again law enforcement is faced with an educated criminal element that is using identity theft, straw borrowers, shell companies, along with a slew of industry insiders, to conceal their methods and override lender controls.

The FBI just released a comprehensive new report on real estate and mortgage fraud, and, as you might expect given everything we talk about here on Flipping Frenzy, it isn’t a pretty picture. The information contained in the report can get quite technical, with plenty of charts, graphs, and hard numbers. Regardless, it’s worth the read–see “The 2007 Mortgage Fraud Report.” Among the Report’s key findings:

1. Real Estate and Mortgage Fraud is clearly on the rise. Although there is no central way to track the total extent of the problem, the FBI received 46,717 Suspicious Activity Reports related to real estate and mortgage fraud last year—compared to 35,617 in 2006 and just 6,936 in 2003. Only 7% of these reports documented an exact dollar amount in terms of losses, but even so, the total loss from this 7% was $813 million. The FBI’s caseload has also escalated. By the end of fiscal year 2007, the Bureau was handling just over 1,200 real estate and mortgage fraud investigations—a 47% increase from 2006 and a whopping 176% increase from 2003.
2. The downward trend in the housing market will continue (see forecasts provided by the Mortgage Bankers Association in the report), providing further incentive for shady real estate industry insiders to look for dishonest ways to turn a profit and growing opportunities for scam artists to prey on vulnerable homeowners.
3. The subprime lending crisis is a contributing factor to real estate mortgage fraud, both directly and indirectly. Subprime loans, designed for people with poor or limited credit histories, now represent more than 13% of all outstanding loans–double the percentage of five years ago. These high-interest, high-risk loans contributed to the 2.2 million foreclosures filed during 2007, up 75% from 2006. The trouble actually began when home prices were rising a few years ago, leading to relaxed lending practices throughout the industry and the exaggeration of assets by industry insiders and borrowers under their charge anxious to qualify for loans, both of which contributed to fraud.
4. The top 10 hotspots nationwide for mortgage fraud in 2007, carefully mapped from multiple public and private sources, were:
   
   1. Florida
   2. Georgia
   3. Michigan
   4. California
   5. Illinois
   6. Ohio
   7. Texas
   8. New York
   9. Colorado
   10. Minnesota

   Other states significantly affected include: Arizona, Maryland, Utah, Nevada, Missouri, Indiana, Tennessee, Virginia, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The north-central region of the United States had the largest share of fraud, followed by the west and southeast regions.



5. The latest mortgage scams run the gamut: from builder-bailout schemes where developers unload excess inventory through financial trickery, to foreclosure rescue schemes that trick homeowners into signing over the deed to their house; from seller-assistance scams that use false appraisals to sell homes, to identity theft that leads to home equity credit lines being opened and drained.

The FBI’s report also briefly recounts the agency’s own response to the problem, including the Bureau’s participation in the Department of Justice’s Mortgage Fraud Working Group, through which the agency says it is helping to identify large-scale real estate industry insiders and criminal enterprises conducting systemic real estate fraud

The purpose of the The 2007 Mortgage Fraud Report is to provide insight into the breadth and depth of real estate and mortgage fraud crimes in the United States. The report updates the 2006 Mortgage Fraud Report and addresses current fraud projections, issues, and hot spots (as noted above). The objective of the report, according to the FBI, is to provide FBI program managers with relative data to justify real estate and mortgage fraud investigative and preventive resources and for investigators to identify real estate and mortgage fraud activity.

One day after warning the U.S. Senate about a tremendous surge in the FBI’s mortgage fraud investigations, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, III, talked in more detailed terms about the growth in both corporate fraud and public corruption cases–including those involving Real Estate and Mortgage Fraud–at the annual conference of the American Bar Association’s Section of Litigation in Washington, D.C.

Despite limited resources, Mueller told conference attendees that the FBI’s corporate fraud cases have grown more than 80% since 2003. Last year, the FBI had more than 490 corporate and securities fraud convictions.

Mueller predicted that the problem will only worsen because of the “ripple effect of the sub-prime crisis and its impact on the credit market.” As Flipping Frenzy reported last Thursday, the FBI has identified 19 companies involved in corporate fraud matters related to the sub-prime lending crisis. According to Mueller, the Bureau is now actively investigating more than 1,300 mortgage fraud matters.

Mueller believes part of the problem is “rampant conflicts of interest in the corporate suites.” He told conference attendees that FBI investigations “further emphasize the need for independent board members, auditors, and outside counsel. Shareholders rely on the board of directors to serve as the corporate watchdog. …[But] board members are often beholden to the executives they are expected to oversee.”

Acknowledging recent FBI missteps resulting from inadequate internal controls–and a new Office of Integrity and Compliance to identify risks before they become problems–Mueller said, “As we all understand, it is better for a company to self-report and remediate its own wrongdoing before the FBI and the Department of Justice become involved. Executives who let the situation escalate to the point of a sudden restatement—and a resulting loss of shareholder confidence–often do greater harm to the companies they are trying to protect than if they had exercised early intervention.”

Mueller added that in his days as a defense attorney, he met a number of executives who could rationalize every bad decision, and warned that “it is a slippery slope from behavior that skirts ethical or legal boundaries to behavior that crosses the line completely.”

As we all know, the FBI works to combat corruption in the public sector–now its top criminal priority–because, as Mueller pointed out in his remarks, “democracy and corruption cannot co-exist.” As of today, the FBI has more than 2,500 open public corruption cases, an increase of more than 50 percent since 2003. During the past two years alone, more than 18,000 public officials have been convicted, according to the FBI’

“The FBI,” Mueller said, “is uniquely situated to address public corruption. We have the skills to conduct sophisticated investigations. But more than that, we are insulated from political pressure. We are able to go where the evidence leads us, without fear of reprisal or recrimination.”

Mueller wrapped up his remarks by adding, “In the end, it does not matter if the corruption is national or local. It does not matter if it is millions of dollars, or merely hundreds. There is no level of acceptable corruption. The violation of trust is the same. The damage to the taxpayers is the same.“

We learned some interesting things today about the FBI’s probe into real estate and mortgage fraud at some of Wall Street’s top financial institutions. According to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, III’s testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies, the Bureau’s investigation of real estate fraud in the mortgage industry now encompasses 19 companies, up from 17 just one month ago. In Mueller’s own words:

• “We’ve had a tremendous surge in cases related to the subprime mortgage debacle. We currently have almost 1,300 cases that have grown exponentially over the last several years and we expect them to grow even further.”
• “We have also 19 cases involving institutions themselves where mortgage fraud may have contributed to misstatements and the like.”.

Mueller, who was testifying on Capital Hill in defense of the FBI’s budget request for 2009, also said that when the Bureau’s budget request was originally drafted, the subprime mortgage mess had not yet “grown to the point where we could see the extent of the surge,” and that he was not certain at this point when we can expect to see the extent of the surge.

Additional information, from Reuters:

Bureau officials declined to name any additional companies targeted in the probe. “We’ve always said it was a fluid number,” FBI spokesman Stephen Kodak said. “It could change at any time.” He said the bureau has publicly acknowledged only one company as involved — Doral Financial Corp (DRL.N: Quote, Profile, Research). A former Doral treasurer was indicted for investment fraud last month. He denied the allegations and the company declined to comment.

The largest U.S. mortgage lender, Countrywide (CFC.N: Quote, Profile, Research), also is under FBI investigation, authorities have said, although the FBI has declined to comment and Countrywide said it was unaware of any investigation. When the FBI disclosed its industry investigation, major investment banks Goldman Sachs (GS.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Morgan Stanley (MS.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Bear Stearns Cos (BSC.N: Quote, Profile, Research) each said the government had asked them for information, but there was no confirmation of any FBI role. Beazer Homes (BZH.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said last year it had received a federal grand jury subpoena related to its mortgage business.

Falling home prices and inappropriate mortgage underwriting have grabbed the headlines and much of the blame for mortgage credit woes in recent months. But the significant rise in mortgage fraud over the past 10 years is another important trend. New research from TowerGroup predicts that losses from real estate and mortgage fraud will reach $2.5 billion in 2008 and that comparable losses will continue for several years thereafter. The new research, titled “US Mortgage Fraud: Types, Trends, and Detection Tools,” examines the different types of fraud, characterizes the tools available to combat fraud schemes, and assesses likely future directions of mortgage fraud prevention services and products.

Related: FBI spokesperson, Stephen Kodak, tells New York Times News Service that 2008 is turning out to be a record-breaking year for real estate and mortgage fraud. Kodak says the FBI received nearly 30,000 suspicious activity reports so far for FY08. The 2007 fiscal year, Kodak reports, ended with 46,000 reports and 260 FBI-involved convictions.

The FBI calls it the “latest scam on the block,” but for years now we’ve been warning people and reporting about scam artists who steal your identity and then your home. Now, after years of reporting and writing about this sinister act, the FBI is stepping up its efforts to make homeowners aware of the horrible connection between identity theft and real estate fraud.

Here’s how the scam typically works:

(Image courtesy of the FBI)

It can get even more complicated than this, as we can see from a fresh case out of California that the FBI investigated with the Internal Revenue Service. A Downey, California, real estate industry insider pleaded guilty this week to federal fraud and money laundering charges, and in doing so, admitting her role in a $12 million real estate fraud scheme that targeted homeowners in default on their mortgages and falsely promised them help. Martha Rodriguez, 35, pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud and one count of money laundering in relation to the scheme that ran from May 2003 until November 2005.

By pleading guilty, Rodriguez admitted that she and several co-schemers located victim homeowners through computerized databases that list homes going into foreclosure. Rodriguez promised victim homeowners that their homes would get refinanced. However, instead of obtaining refinancing, Rodriguez and the other defendants charged in this case submitted loan applications in the names of straw buyers who were purportedly buying the property. In some cases, the straw buyers were paid for the use of their personal information. In other cases, the defendants used personal information of people without their knowledge.

The loan applications for the straw buyers–which always contained false information–caused a series of lenders to fund mortgages that otherwise would not have been funded. The loan proceeds were used to pay off the loan in default, and the remaining proceeds were skimmed off by Rodriguez and her co-schemers.

Even though they were promised that they would keep their homes, the victim homeowners lost title to their homes. The lenders suffered losses when the straw buyers failed to make loan payments and the second loans went into default. The scheme targeted commercial lenders and more than 100 homeowners across the the southern part of Los Angeles.

The scheme was operated through Rodriguez’s real estate and escrow agencies, Silvernet Properties in Downey and Bellasi Escrow in Seal Beach.

As a result of her guilty pleas, Rodriguez faces a maximum possible sentence of 40 years in federal prison. Rodriguez has agreed to forfeit to the government her interest in five homes, a truck and approximately $900,000 in cash that was seized by the government around the time of her arrest.

Rodriguez was indicted with four co-defendants. One of them–Cynthia Valenzuela, a 24-year-old Downey resident–pleaded guilty last Friday to mail fraud charges. Rodriguez and Valenzuela are scheduled to be sentenced by is United States District Court in Los Angeles on August 20.

Three remaining defendants are scheduled to go to trial on July 10:

• Vladimir Stefanovic, 35, of Lancaster, CA (Martha Rodriguez’s common-law husband)
• Edward Seung Ok, 40, of Huntington Beach, CA
• Maria G. Juarez, 36, of Diamond Bar

There’s no telling why the FBI chooses to highlight one real estate fraud bust over another, but buried deep within a recent report about Operation Homewrecker–an extensive mortgage fraud investigation by the FBI and IRS–was a very telling piece of information. According to Drew Parenti, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Sacramento office:

“Mortgage Fraud has recently been elevated to the FBI’s highest financial crime priority, and we are attempting to address the numerous reports of fraud within the real estate industry that have occurred across the country.”

Parenti went on to say that the FBI is focusing more attention than ever on industry professionals, the insiders “who have manipulated the mortgage loan process for their own financial gain.”

Parenti’s comments come on the heels of one of the FBI’s latest real estate fraud-related indictments. According to Assistant U.S. Attorneys Laura Ferris, Rob Tice-Raskin, and Ellen Endrizzi, who are prosecuting the case, the charges are broken out into two separate indictments, “Head One” and “Head Two.”

Two days ago, the FBI announced the indictment of 19 individuals for mortgage fraud-related offenses under Operation Homewrecker. The leader of the nationwide scam was Charles Head, 33, of Los Angeles, California, who targeted homeowners in dire financial straits, fraudulently obtaining title to over 100 homes and stole millions of dollars through fraudulently obtained loans and mortgages.

According to the trio of Assistant U.S. Attorneys prosecuting the case, a federal grand jury returned the first set of charges in a 13-count indictment against 16 defendants with violations of mail fraud, conspiracy to commit mail fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and other related offenses. “Head One” involved a “foreclosure rescue” scam, netting approximately $6.7 million in fraudulently obtained funds taken from 47 homeowners, nearly all of whom were located in California.

From January 2004 to mid-March 2006, the defendants contacted desperate homeowners, offering two options allowing them to avoid foreclosure and obtain thousands of dollars up-front to help pay mounting bills. If the homeowner could not qualify for the first option, which virtually none could, they would be offered the second option. Under the latter option, an “investor” would be added to the title of the home, to whom the homeowner would make a rental payment of an amount allegedly less than their mortgage payment, thereby allowing the homeowner to repair their credit by having the mortgage payments made in a timely fashion.

Unfortunately all of this was a scam. The defendants would recruit straw buyers as the investors and oftentimes these individuals would in fact replace the homeowners on the titles of the properties without the homeowners’ knowledge. These straw buyers were often friends and family members of the defendants. Once the straw buyer had title to the home, the defendants immediately applied for a mortgage to extract the maximum available equity from the home. The defendants would then share the proceeds of the ill-gotten equity and rent being paid by the victim homeowner. When the defendants ultimately would sell the home, stop making the mortgage payment, and/or pursue an eviction proceeding, the victim homeowner was left without their home, equity, or repaired credit.

The following defendants were charged in the February 28, 2008 “Head One” indictment:

• Charles Head, 33, of La Habra, California
• Jeremy Michael Head, 30, of Huntington Beach, California
• Elham Assadi, aka Elham Assadi Jouzani, aka Ely Assadi, 30, of Irvine, California
• Leonard Bernot, 51, of Laguna Hills, California
• Akemi Bottari, 28, of Los Angeles, California
• Joshua Coffman, 29, of North Hollywood, California
• John Corcoran, aka Jack Corcoran, 52, of Anaheim, California
• Sarah Mattson, 27, of Phoenix, Arizona
• Domonic McCarns, 33, of Brea, California
• Anh Nguyen, 36, of Los Angeles, California
• Omar Sandoval, 32, of Rancho Cucamonga, California
• Xochitl Sandoval, 29, of Rancho Cucamonga
• Eduardo Vanegas, 28, of Phoenix, Arizona
• Andrwe Vu, 39, of Santa Ana, California
• Justin Wiley, 28, of Irvine, California
• Kou Yang, 32, of Corona, California

On March 13, the federal grand jury returned a five-count indictment in “Head Two” against seven defendants, including:

• Charles Head, John Corcoran, Kou Yang, each also charged in “Head One”
• Keith Brotemarkle, 42, of Johnstown, Pennsylvania
• Benjamin Budoff, 41, of Colorado Springs, Colorado
• Domonic McCarns, 33, of Brea, California
• Lisa Vang, 24, of Westminster, California

“Head Two” involved an equity-stripping scheme that netted approximately $5.9 million in stolen equity from 68 homeowners in states across the nation. While still targeting distressed homeowners and defrauding mortgage lenders through the use of straw buyers, this time Charles Head altered the scheme so that he would receive approximately 97% of the stolen equity, while his employees, and the other defendants, would receive either the remaining 3% of equity or a salary from the fraudulently-obtained funding.

Instead of recruiting friends and family members as straw buyers, as in “Head One,” in “Head Two” the defendants recruited strangers via the Internet. They also used referrals from mortgage brokers to identify and solicit new victim homeowners. Beyond advertising on the Internet, the defendants also would send blast faxes to mortgage brokers throughout the United States and generate mass emails to potential victims. Through material misrepresentations and omissions, victim homeowners would be offered what appeared to be their last best chance to save their homes. Unfortunately, as in “Head One,” these victims also were left without their homes, equity, or repaired credit.

Imagine buying your dream home. Your credit is a bit shaky but you manage to secure a subprime loan with an adjustable rate mortgage. A few years later, interest rates jump and you can no longer afford to pay your mortgage. You see an advertisement in a local newspaper for a business that’s willing to help–the ad states they can pay your mortgage for a modest monthly fee while you take the necessary time to get back on your feet. But here’s the bad part: It’s a scam. The company just takes your money and runs!

This is just one of the real estate and mortgage fraud-related schemes the FBI is concerned about, and according to senior criminal investigators at the Bureau, the problem is only going to worsen over the next 18 months. These scams–which I write about in my latest book, Foreclosure Self-Defense For Dummies–include plenty of shenanigans with mortgages and subprime loans and are costing this great nation of ours tens of billions of dollars a year, if not more.

“Greed is definitely not good for our economy right now,” says Ken Kaiser, the FBI’s top criminal investigative executive. “It’s hurting homeowners. It’s hurting honest businesses. And it’s hurting investors and markets around the world.”

With those thoughts in mind, the FBI says it is now squarely focused on proactive initiatives designed to crack down on the largest of these financial crimes, and is even shifting resources as trends emerge, all the while working hand-in-hand with a host of government and private sector partners.

In particular:

• As we wrote last week, the FBI is now investigating 14 corporations involved in subprime lending as part of its “Subprime Mortgage Industry Fraud Initiative” launched last year. The companies being investigated come from across the financial services and real estate industry, from mortgage lenders to investment banks that bundle loans into securities sold to investors.
• The Bureau now has more than 1,200 open real estate and mortgage fraud cases (that’s up about 40% from last year), mostly involving fraud for profit, where straw buyers and real estate industry insiders rig schemes to buy properties that are illegally flipped or allowed to go into foreclosure.

The FBI also says suspicious activity reports–for potential real estate and mortgage fraud–have increased from 3,000 in 2003 to 48,000 in fiscal year 2007, and are projected to reach more than 60,000 such reports in 2008.

Finally, the FBI’s latest “hotspot list” for real estate and mortgage fraud includes: California, Texas, Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and Utah (Utah is new to the list); and, on a somewhat surprising note, the Bureau now says it sees no links whatsoever to organized crime syndicates, street gangs, or terrorist groups in its real estate and mortgage fraud case portfolio.

According this morning’s edition of The Wall Street Journal, tensions are rising between federal and state authorities as the number of agencies–including the FBI, SEC, Justice Department, Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s office–investigating mortgage fraud expands.

Cuomo, the Journal reports, “is in a tussle with the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), the federal regulator that oversees mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac… Their dispute is over who should be the investigating allegations of fraudulent appraisals and mortgage fraud.”

From Kara Scannell at The Wall Street Journal:

The interaction of state and federal oversight has long been a political hot potato. Friction is expected to increase as rising number of participants — including the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission — probe the mortgage area.

Mr. Cuomo’s office is precluded by law from investigating federally chartered banks, where federal oversight pre-empts state interest.

With complaints about real estate and mortgage fraud at an all-time high, the FBI on Tuesday announced it has launched a criminal investigation into the dealings of 14 major corporations servicing the real estate industry. FBI officials told reporters yesterday afternoon that the probes involved potential violations, including accounting fraud and insider trading, but they would not identify the specific companies under investigation. Neil Power, who heads the FBI’s economic crimes unit, did say the probe reaches across the real estate industry to include developers, subprime lenders, companies that reviewed loans and the investment banks that held them.

“On insider trading, we’re looking in some cases at whether executives were aware that the value of their holdings would be going down and the executives traded on that information,” said Power, according to CNN. “On accounting fraud, we’re looking at housing developers who may have reported cash reserve accounts to reflect falsely inflated values.”

Power and other senior officials told CNN that the number of suspicious activity reports related to real estate and mortgage fraud they review for potential investigation skyrocketed from 3,000 in 2003 to about 35,000 in 2006, to 48,000 in 2007. In the first quarter of this fiscal year, Power told CNN, officials have already received 15,000 such reports, putting us on pace to receive 60,000 complaints this year.

“We anticipate in the next year that another wave of adjustable rate mortgages will reset and with that we anticipate that the mortgage corporate fraud potential cases to increase,” said Sharon Ormsby, head of the FBI’s financial crimes section, according to Reuters.

The FBI’s investigation is being run in parallel with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), which has opened more than 30 civil investigations into the subprime market collapse. Some of the probes overlap, an official told Reuters. Targets of the SEC probe include Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, as well as bond insurer MBIA.

One interesting figure being reported: According to CNN, the FBI says it investigates only cases involving losses of $500,000 or more, and that last year 56 percent of all cases had losses of more than $1 million.

“Subprime loans are decreasing but … suspicions of mortgage fraud are increasing,” the FBI’s Sharon Ormsby is quoted as saying.

• Nightmare on Highbury Court: A dispute over bricks led to bankruptcy, eviction, jail and fractured lives; first of two parts. Life was good for Roland and Marie Dreilich in the summer of 1999. In their mid-30s at the time, they’d already purchased two homes, taking advantage of the booming real estate market of the 1990s to acquire equity and move up the housing ladder.
• Real estate lawyers asleep at the fee switch: Most puzzlingly of all, is the fact that real estate fraud is actually less prevalent today, than it was when Bill 152 was a glint in the McGinty government’s eyes. Over the past two years, lawyers and title insurers have put into place far more stringent controls and fraud has declined accordingly.
• Mortgage meltdown linked to fraud: The desire to make a “quick buck,” along with extremely lax lending practices, are considered to be among the chief reasons for the recent decline in the nationwide mortgage and housing markets, according to a Utah title company executive.
• Grandview man gets one year for mortgage fraud: The second of three defendants in the mortgage fraud scheme involving former Kansas City Councilwoman Saundra McFadden-Weaver was sentenced Thursday to one year in federal prison. Ricky Hamilton, 53, of Grandview, also was ordered by U.S. Chief District Judge Fernando Gaitan of the Western District of Missouri to pay $144,234 in restitution.
• Stock Market & Stocks: Fraud a Major Concern as Economy Worsens: The people who pay the price for Wall Street abuse need to know what to do if they have been victims of Wall Street or mortgage fraud and abuse, what to do to protect themselves so they can live now, sustain and grow for a secure future, and other steps they can take to best prepare for what we believe is the inevitable recession.
• FBI Launches Mortgage Fraud Task Force in the Nation’s Capital: The FBI is launching a mortgage fraud task force in its Washington field office, joining a widening net of state and local investigators digging into the market crisis. Investigators are seeking to uncover evidence of overvalued home appraisals, shoddy lending practices and alleged irregularities in the packaging and sale of groups of loans that were marketed to ordinary investors, state investment funds and big Wall Street banks.
• Foreclosure Fraud: Freddie Mac Warns Borrowers with Video Dramatization on ‘YouTube’: Can a custom made video posted to YouTube keep troubled borrowers from losing their homes to fraud artists? Freddie Mac aims to find out. One of the nation’s largest investors in residential mortgages, Freddie Mac decided to produce an Internet video dramatizing a common foreclosure fraud scheme after a new survey found one in four delinquent borrowers go to the Internet before their bank or lender for information about avoiding foreclosure. Freddie Mac’s anti-fraud video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/AvoidFraud.
• Six face federal indictments in Provo, Utah mortgage fraud scheme: Six people have been indicted on federal charges for an alleged mortgage fraud scheme that inflated the value of high-end homes in an affluent Provo neighborhood. Prosecutors say the six formed a network of mortgage brokers, investors, real estate agents, appraisers, straw buyers and escrow agents to fraudulently obtain loans secured with property worth less than the loans.
• In Modesto (Calif.), Fraud Destroyed The American Dream For Many: The terms of the loans may have been unusual. But for many of the immigrants who signed up for them, they were simply a way to afford the $300,000 and $400,000 new homes along streets with names like Rancho Encantado and a litany of saints.
• Lousy credit? Buy somebody else’s: The Bush administration came up with one fix for some sub-prime borrowers who are in trouble. A San Diego company offers another: Buy a better credit score. With one or more of the “seasoned primary accounts” that TradeLine Solutions Inc. began selling this week, the company’s website says, you can “dramatically increase your credit score” for as little as $1,199.

According to Realtor Lori Polin, she was totally unaware that what she was involved with consisted of real estate and mortgage fraud. If ignorance of the law was an appropriate defense, she could be off the hook. Unfortunately it’s not. According to a recent story in the St. Petersburg Times entitled “Unsigned letter accuses agent of mortgage fraud” Polin was allegedly involved in classic cash back at closing schemes.

Here’s how a cash back at closing scheme works:

• The buyer pays more for a property than it’s worth, and the seller agrees to kick back the surplus cash to the buyer at the closing.

On its surface, cash back at closing seems to benefit everyone involved. The buyer pockets some extra cash. The seller unloads his house at or near the asking price. The real estate agent gets a bigger commission. The loan officer chalks up another successful loan. And the lender stands to earn more interest over the life of the loan. Everybody wins.

Or so it seems.

Unfortunately, as with most deals that seem too good to be true, cash back at closing schemes are just another way of scamming someone–in this case, the lender, who’s fooled into loaning more money than the collateral used to secure that loan is worth. If the borrower defaults on the loan (which is almost a sure thing in cash back at closing schemes), then the lender can’t recover the money by selling the property.

Cash back at closing also:

• Inflates housing values, making housing less affordable
• Artificially raises property taxes
• Hurts honest real estate agents because they lose business to dishonest agents who offer cash back deals
• Stimulates foreclosure and destroys neighborhoods that begin to buckle when homeowners default on the inflated loans

With cash back at closing, what may have seemed like a win-win situation leaves plenty of losers in its wake.

According to an anonymous letter distributed to the press and many of Polin’s colleagues, Polin artificially inflated the prices of nine homes in Tampa and North Pinellas, so buyers could get larger loans. In most cases, the homes were mortgaged for approximately $100,000 more than their true market value, and if the allegations prove true, then these transactions definitely fall into the category of cash back at closing. The perpetrators need to be brought to justice. The question is, did Lori Polin do anything wrong?

Polin firmly believes she is innocent, because, in her own words, “All these deals were put together by attorneys and title companies and lenders.” All she did was list and sell the homes. Some of the evidence, however, makes it look as though Polin could not possibly be unaware of what was going on.

In the case of Iris Alfonso, for example, Alfonso’s house had been on the market for several months when Polin allegedly asked if she would accept a reduced price of $449,900. Shortly thereafter, Alfonso received a purchase contract offering her $540,000 for her home. Why would any buyer offer a seller $90,100 more than the seller was willing to accept? The only possible answer is cash back at closing.

According to Polin, she simply listed the homes for sale. What the buyer and seller agree to has nothing to do with her, according to Polin. If the reported incidents did occur, a law was clearly broken. As the FBI clearly states (emphasis mine):

“It is illegal for a person to make any false statement regarding income, assets, debt, or matters of identification, or to willfully overvalue any land or property, in a loan and credit application for the purpose of influencing in any way the action of a financial institution.”

Whether or not Polin broke the law and is guilty of conspiring to commit fraud is up to law enforcement and the courts to decide. Whatever the outcome, this case highlights the need for real estate and mortgage fraud training in the real estate and mortgage lending industries. Attorneys and law enforcement agencies could also benefit from such training programs. Time and time again, I hear about professionals who should know better becoming involved in fraudulent transactions. Some are willing accomplices or even ringleaders. Others are unwilling accomplices or victims who are simply abused by savvy con artists. By receiving the proper training, these professionals can help defend themselves, their clients, and the housing industry from those who are committed to destroying the American Dream of homeownership.

To learn more about the dangers associated with cash back at closing and other common and not so common real estate and mortgage fraud scams, pick up a copy of one of my latest books, Protect Yourself from Real Estate and Mortgage Fraud: Preserving the American Dream of Homeownership

A federal grand jury has indicted the former executive vice president and CFO of a San Ramon, California-based mortgage company on charges that he planned and executed a mortgage fraud scheme that defrauded financial institutions of over $13 million. Edward Batayeh, a.k.a. Ed Bhataybh, who worked for CHL Mortgage Group, fled from FBI Special Agents last November and is now considered armed and dangerous.

According to his indictment, Bateyah is accused of “double funding” fraudulent loans by selling variations of the same loan to multiple investors without the investors’ knowledge. Bateyah carried out the conspiracy by sending fraudulent loan packages (e.g., mortgage notes, Deeds of Trust, loan applications, verifications of employment, etc.) to financial institutions without property owners knowledge. The 40-year-old Bateyah is also alleged to have obtained properties in the name of fellow CHL Mortgage Group employees, and then obtained multiple fraudulent loans on said properties.

Oh wait, there’s more… Batayeh is also charged with tax evasion for failing to pay his taxes from 2001 through 2004, and authorities found out about his alias because–get this–he recently sent a false resume using the name of Ed Bhataybh to Aurora Loan Services, Inc., one of the financial institutions he defrauded.

Anyone with information regarding Bateyah’s whereabouts should contact the FBI at (415) 553-7400.

Dateline NBC aired “Thief of Hearts” last night–a one-hour profile of noted real estate and mortgage fraud con artist, Matthew Cox. Unfortunately, the entire balance of the show focused not on the problems, warning signs, and societal issues associated with real estate and mortgage fraud–a crime that can only be described as a runaway cancer that is eating away at our floorboards. No, in typical big media fashion, NBC chose to position Cox as a ‘Don Juan’ who stole women’s hearts while attempting to overcome some sort of inferiority or superiority complex by stealing millions of dollars and the identities of close associates and “friends.”

The truth is that Matthew Cox and his known accomplices–namely, Rebecca Hauck, Alison Arnold, and Amanda Gardner (all of whom were interviewed for the piece)–literally ruined people’s lives and damaged entire neighborhoods, all in the name of greed and corruption. (To her credit, Alison Arnold turned herself in, served time in prison, and is now paying off a stiff penalty for her part in Cox’s schemes.)

Rather than focus on the damage Cox did or God forbid, the warning signs of real estate and mortgage fraud, NBC Correspondent Keith Morrison took his viewers on an hour-long journey that touched solely on Cox’s artistic ambitions, dyslexia, ability to woo women, and his writing (Cox wrote a novel called The Associates with a plot that closely resembles the time he spent committing real estate and mortgage fraud).

It’s not as though the producers of Dateline NBC were unaware of my efforts and those of my colleague Rachel Dollar in educating the public about threats from real estate and mortgage fraud. In early December of 2006, Joe Kraynak, a writer who worked with Rachel and me on the book “Protect Yourself from Real Estate and Mortgage Fraud” (to be published by Kaplan, this August, 2007), emailed the following message to the producers of Dateline NBC:

‘To Catch a Predator’ gave me an idea for another series centering around a sting operation. I’m currently co-authoring a book with the top two mortgage/real estate fraud experts in the nation–Ralph R. Roberts and Rachel Dollar. Ralph works alongside law enforcement to catch real estate con artists and educate industry professionals. I think a documentary complete with sting operations would be intriguing. Check out FlippingFrenzy.com and www.mortgagefraudblog.com. I can also provide you with additional contact information for Ralph and Rachel. Please let me know if you need additional information.

NBC had the perfect opportunity to educate and inform an alarming number of people on the dangers and warning signs associated with Real Estate and Mortgage Fraud. Instead, it only added to the problem by sensationalizing Cox’s efforts.

According to a number of news reports, Beazer Homes–one of the nation’s ten largest single-family homebuilders–is being investigated by federal authorities for questionable business practices, including the possibility that the company engaged in mortgage fraud. From The New York Times:

Beazer Homes USA, which has suffered hefty losses amid the downturn in the housing market, now faces a federal investigation into mortgage fraud and other accusations. Its shares plunged nearly 17 percent in trading after hours Tuesday.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States attorney’s office in Charlotte, N.C., as well as the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, started an investigation of Beazer Homes last week, a spokesman for the F.B.I. office in Charlotte, Ken Lucas, said. Mr. Lucas said the inquiry involved “fraud in general” and dealt with corporate, mortgage and investment matters.

Beazer would not confirm the investigation, but in a statement said it would “fully cooperate with any investigation by any government agency.”

Weak demand for new homes, sales at discounts and the need for inventory write-downs have taken a toll on the company’s financial results.

The Charlotte Observer reported last week that Beazer Homes had an unusually high rate of home foreclosures in many developments around North Carolina’s largest city. The paper reported that of the 2,900 Beazer homes built in Mecklenburg County between 1997 and 2006, at least 388 have foreclosed–a rate above 13 percent.

Nationally, the paper said, fewer than 3 percent of buyers lose homes to foreclosure. In its series, The Observer documented four examples where the income and debts of borrowers were misstated on their applications for government-insured loans.

“The allegations by the Charlotte Observer focused primarily on one Charlotte subdivision,” said Beazer in a statement issued late yesterday afternoon. “In that subdivision, Beazer Mortgage Corporation originated the loans for the borrowers and served as a broker, not a lender. We were involved on the front end of the loan transaction process, compiling the necessary information, which we then submitted to the lender for underwriting review. The ultimate underwriting decision for the loan rested with the lender.”

Based on its own internal investigations to date, Beazer says it has not found any evidence to support the allegations in the Charlotte Observer.

Earlier today, the FBI and the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) entered into an agreement they say will aid in the fight to combat Mortgage Fraud. According to the agreement, the FBI and MBA will make available to the public a Mortgage Fraud Warning Notice as a “proactive means of educating consumers and mortgage-lending professionals of the penalties and consequences of this criminal activity.”

According to the FBI, Mortgage Fraud Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) referred to law enforcement by financial institutions increased from 17,127 in 2004 to 35,617 in 2006. Also revealed in today’s announcement: The FBI’s Mortgage Fraud investigations have focused mostly on large-scale fraud perpetrated by organized crime and industry insiders, including attorneys, brokers, appraisers, and Realtors. Since September 2002, the number and types of investigations the FBI has participated in has increased from 436 to 1,036. Of its current caseload, 51 percent of its investigations involve expected losses in excess of $1 million, and 57 percent involve federally insured financial institutions.

The FBI says it works closely with national associations such as the MBA, as well as with individual lenders, in a continual effort to define and combat the growing mortgage fraud problem. The newly developed Mortgage Fraud Warning Notice is supposed to enhance the FBI’s endeavors to put potential perpetrators on notice in an effort to stop crime before it is committed.

The United States Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, along with special agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation combined efforts to convict a Houston, TX, man for his role in a multi-million dollar mortgage fraud scheme. At a hearing held last Friday before a United States District Judge, Lawrence Benham was sentenced in connection with his guilty plea to wire fraud and mail fraud involving a financial institution. The court sentenced Benham to 8 years in prison, and ordered him to pay restitution of $412,800. Benham, who has been in federal custody without bond since his arrest in September 2005, will remain in federal custody to serve his sentence.

The 42-year-old Benham was convicted of devising a mortgage fraud scheme in which he located residential properties for sale and persuaded and used others as nominee purchasers of the properties for his benefit. Using the nominee borrower’s credit and identifying information on loan applications, Benham exaggerated the their financial resources and ability to repay loans, and arranged for nominee borrowers to purchase properties at prices far in excess of their true value. Benham then directed as much as $1.5 million from the closing on the residential properties to be paid to himself or to accounts he controlled.

At a previous hearing, Benham admitted that on July 7, 2003, he caused a federally insured financial institution to wire transfer $325,151 as a result of a fraudulent loan application he submitted in the name of a nominee borrower, without the borrower’s permission. Not surprisingly, he used those funds for his own benefit, knowing he was not legally entitled to do so. On October 3, 2003, Benham admitted having caused a payment on the mortgage to be sent by commercial courier to a lender for the purpose of avoiding detection and continuing the fraudulent scheme.

Benham conceded in court that the amount of gain from his mortgage fraud scheme was between $1.5 and $2.0 million, and that he used the proceeds to purchase or lease assets for himself and his business, including a Land Rover, furnishings, and luxury items like plasma televisions.

At industry events lately, real estate professionals gather to talk shop and discuss market trends for 2007, but I notice that nobody’s talking about the elephant in the conference hall. We’re predicting the health of the market. We’re exploring new technologies. We’re trading secrets. We’re swapping ideas and business cards. But the silence over what I believe is a looming foreclosure epidemic, is deafening. Nobody utters the words “flipping,” “fraud,” or “foreclosure.” It’s almost as if these three words have been banned from the industry.

I’ve attended dozens of conferences, and very few of them schedule sessions devoted to real estate and mortgage fraud. The topic tends to have more of a following at conferences for mortgage bankers. Perhaps real estate professionals are simply too busy helping their clients buy and sell houses, or they find the topic less stimulating than others.

By not paying sufficient attention to real estate and mortgage fraud, however, we’ve become blind to the fact that illegal flipping, cash back at closing, and other forms of real estate and mortgage fraud are chipping away at the very foundation of the real estate industry, leading to shameful foreclosure rates that only promise to become tragically worse. While we’re discussing lead generation, marketing techniques, and the power of blogging, absent from our discussion is any mention of what to do to protect the homeowners, our clients-the people who butter our bread.

What is currently happening in the real estate and mortgage industry can only be described as the perfect storm. Fraudsters are ripping off lenders and homeowners with impunity. Artificially inflated housing values are soaring, and with them, so are property taxes and insurance premiums. Lenders are losing billions to fraud and then turning around and ripping off homeowners by selling them adjustable-rate mortgages and other high-interest loans they can’t possibly afford. And personal income just isn’t rising fast enough to keep up with the market. Strapped-for-cash homeowners are beginning to use their homes as ATMs, mortgaging themselves into foreclosure and bankruptcy.

Yet, few real estate professionals express any concern. They continue to carry on business as usual, and often “business as usual” includes actively participating in the fraudulent activities that threaten the American Dream of homeownership. In fact, the FBI estimates that 80% of all real estate and mortgage fraud involves industry insiders!

We need to turn these numbers around in a hurry before our entire industry collapses. We need to wake up and realize that our clients-average homeowners-are hurting. We need to recognize that fraud is destroying the very industry that feeds our families and that it directly contributes to the rising foreclosure rates around the country. We need to educate ourselves and our clients, and then take action to spot, stop, and report and post fraudulent transactions that we witness, regardless of whether the person committing fraud happens to be a client, colleague, friend, or family member.

If we fail to take action now, none of us will have the right to complain when our children and grandchildren cannot afford to purchase a house, when our friends and relatives have their homes stolen right out from under them, and when our businesses crumble because the average citizen cannot afford a home.

I would like to see future conferences focus a little more on that elephant we all seem to be ignoring.