Eddie Zaben, 39, Dearborn, Michigan, is charged with one count of continuing criminal enterprise (racketeering), a 20-year felony, and eight counts of false pretenses over $20,000, each a 10-year felony. The charges resulted from a year-long investigation by the Michigan Mortgage Fraud Task Force...

Originaly By MICHAEL POWELL New York Times: As she describes it, Beth Jacobson and her fellow loan officers at Wells Fargo Bank “rode the stagecoach from hell” for a decade, systematically singling out blacks in Baltimore and suburban Maryland for high-interest subprime mortgages. These loans, Baltimore...

June 11 (Bloomberg) — Shirley Breitmaier’s mortgage payment started out at $98 when she refinanced her three-bedroom home in Galt, California, in 2007. The 73-year-old widow may see it jump to $3,500 a month in two years. Breitmaier took out a payment-option adjustable rate mortgage, a loan popular...

DuPage County State’s Attorney Joe Birkett announced today that Vincent Arena, 52 (d.o.b. 10/31/1956) of 1070C Heritage Hill Drive, Naperville, was sentenced to four years in the Illinois Department of Corrections for defrauding the All Saints Catholic Academy in Naperville and several financial institutions...

Originaly by MortgageFraud: Edmund A. Booth, Jr., United States Attorney for the Southern District of Georgia, announced that the federal grand jury sitting in Savannah has returned a twenty-two-count indictment against Arthur James Marshall, Jr. charging him with fraud and money laundering in his real...

In the wake of the bursting of the housing bubble, you’d think there’d be a significant number of investigations into criminal wrongdoing and accounting fraud, similar to what occurred after the S&L crisis and bursting of the stock bubble in 2000.But two years into the crisis the FBI...

Tom Backman says the deal to sell his house in Pacific two years ago seemed fishy from the get-go. The real-estate agent was hard to reach and demanded a specific escrow closer. The actual buyer was never around. Still Backman, who had already moved to rural Idaho, wanted to get the deal closed. He even...

Mortgage fraud has increased so dramatically in the San Joaquin Valley that a task force of federal, state and local agencies has been formed to fight back. The FBI, IRS, Secret Service, Department of Housing and district attorneys in Fresno, Tulare and other counties are among those involved. Their...

 It may not have made a big splash on network news or in print, but for real estate it was the equivalent of a congressional declaration of war — a war against mortgage fraud. Just as security and intelligence agencies were given huge funding boosts by Congress after 9 /11, the FBI, the Justice...