Archives For November 30, 1999

Clarence Lewis III, 46, Houston, Texas, has been sentenced to 15 years in federal prison without parole for running a mortgage fraud scheme. United States District Judge Lynn N. Hughes handed down the prison sentence.

As previously reported by Mortgage Fraud

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Martin Quoc Pham, 28, Garden Grove, California, has been sentenced to 132 months in federal prison for orchestrating two identity theft schemes in which he obtained personal information from hundreds of consumers and used the data in an attempt to fraudulently obtain approximately $1.5 million from home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) and credit cards accounts. Pham was sentenced

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Visanio Eugene Vann, 47, Thousand Oaks, California, was sentenced by United States District Judge S. James Otero in Los Angeles to 95 months in federal prison for orchestrating an identity theft scheme in which he used personal identifying information taken from dozens of mortgage and credit files to fraudulently obtain credit cards that were used to purchase more than $1 million in goods and services. In addition to the nearly

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Kawana Latrell Melvin entered a first offender plea on October 19, 2009, in the Superior Court of Clayton County to felony charges that she unlawfully transacted mortgage business without a license, registration or under an applicable exemption; and made a false statement with respect to her eligibility to work in the Georgia residential mortgage industry.

The Georgia Department of Banking and Finance (“Department”) referred this

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Maria Antonia Franks Hernandez, Wyoming, Michigan, has been accused of defrauding the Michigan State Housing Development Authority (MSHDA) by fraudulently obtaining a mortgage, defaulting on that mortgage and leaving taxpayers to pick up the tab.

Franks Hernandez is accused of stealing her sister’s identity between December 2003 and February 2004 to fraudulently obtain an $83,000

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Most banks rejected Ms. DeForte because her debt level was too high and her credit score too low. But Lend America put Ms. DeForte into a $402,000 loan backed by the Federal Housing Administration…

Kosta Kovachev, 58, formerly a registered broker with the National Association of Securities Dealers, pleaded guilty this morning to one count of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud and one count of wire fraud stemming from his participation with Marc Dreier in the sale of over $100 million dollars in fictitious promissory notes to various hedge funds, as part of a larger

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Sidney Okosun, 41, a Nigerian national residing in Washington, D.C., was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams, Jr. to 18 months in prison followed by five years of supervised release for bank fraud in connection with a scheme to defraud mortgage lenders. Judge Williams also ordered Okosun to pay restitution of $2,165,191. Continue Reading...

14 Bay Area residents have been indicted and charged with conspiracy to manufacture at least 1000 marijuana plants and manufacturing at least 1000 marijuana plants arising out of a wide-scale, sophisticated indoor marijuana cultivation operation in the Central Valley, California. The federal grand jury also returned a separate indictment charging five Bay Area residents with 26 counts of mail fraud in

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Barry C. Westergom, 60, Jacksonville, Florida, pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit wire and bank fraud. Westergom faces a maximum penalty of thirty years in federal prison and a fine of $1million.

According to court documents, the charges arise out of Westergom‘s involvement in a scheme in which a co-conspirator, Juan Carlos

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