Word: floridas
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...Florida's Gulf Coast was crawling with shady real estate investors like Neil Husani during this decade's housing boom. According to the U.S. Attorney's office in Tampa, Husani and three co-conspirators working with his Sarasota-based Capital Force, Inc., bilked seven area banks out of $83 million in a mortgage fraud scheme. Between 2003 and 2006, they bought up dozens of properties, used false information to secure mortgages far in excess of the actual property values, then pocketed the difference, which amounted to more than $40 million. The properties went into foreclosure and the banks, as well...
...Capital Force case is one of the largest mortgage frauds to date in Florida, but it's just the tip of an iceberg of scams that have wrecked broad swaths of the state's reeling housing and commercial real estate market. The situation is worst along the I-4 Corridor between the Tampa and Orlando areas, where almost 30,000 homes are in foreclosure. (Lee County, in fact, has one of the nation's highest foreclosure rates, at about 12%.) In recent years, fraud - involving either property purchases like Capital Force's, or schemes that falsely promise to help desperate...
...long in Florida and the U.S., however, it seemed as though the swindlers were indeed getting away with it. As early as 2004, at the height of the housing frenzy, FBI officials were warning Congress of a mortgage fraud catastrophe: firms like Capital Force were illegally "flipping" properties, often using bogus "straw buyers"; unscrupulous appraisers were inflating their values; sub-prime borrowers lied about their assets; and predatory lenders duped customers into adjustable-rate loans that turned out to be financial time bombs. But according to the Justice Department, prosecutions of cases like those actually dropped between...
...more than 2,000 mortgage fraud investigations, compared to only 295 in 2003. "We still have a substantial way to go" in terms of shifting enough agents to those cases, Mueller said. Of the FBI's 56 field offices, more than 40 now have mortgage-fraud task forces. In Florida's Tampa-based Middle District, as many as 50 agents have been incorporated into new task forces that include more than 10 other federal agencies, such as the Secret Service, the U.S. Postal Service, the Department of Housing & Urban Development, the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation...
...Florida officials are making their own surge, which is only fitting given that appallingly lax state oversight earlier in the decade allowed just about any crook to become a mortgage broker. Five people were busted in Miami on Thursday in a $4.5 million straw buyer scam. Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum this month filed a civil lawsuit against a number of alleged loan-modification scam artists on behalf of scores if not hundreds of people, most of them facing foreclosure, who claim they paid upfront fees as high as $3,000 to have their mortgage terms improved so they could...