Mortgage fraud is a crime that occurs in our nation every day, and the list of its victims is growing. But it's also hurting our local banks and damaging our housing market.
The good news: there are special crime fighting groups that are cracking down on these scammers.
To find out more, KENS 5's Stacia Willson sat down with Ozvaldo Alaniz, the Supervisory Special Agent of the FBI White Collar Crime Squad here in San Antonio.
We're seeing more and more cases involving mortgage fraud. You mentioned one reason is because people are paying more attention to this crime now than ever before.
FBI Special Agent Alaniz: "That's true, the FBI certainly has began to aggressively address mortgage fraud within the last two or three years now. As everyone can tell now, it's a problem that has impacted us nationally beginning with the stock market, foreclosures are on the rise, people are losing their homes, and a lot of this is attributed to the mortgage fraud that was perpetrated four to five years ago."
We had some major indictments for this crime last week. What are some of the things being done to combat this problem?
FBI Special Agent Alaniz: "We're trying to address the most serious violators of mortgage fraud. We're aggressively going after criminal organizations going after those individuals that are responsible for the multimillion dollar mortgage frauds that occurred throughout the nation. Here locally, we are working with our law enforcement partners. We are working with the state regulators in identifying and investigating those individuals who are responsible for causing mortgage fraud."
Obviously, the banks lost a lot of money because of mortgage fraud, but there are other victims as well, Are normal, honest people looking to buy a home also suffering from this problem?
FBI Special Agent Alaniz: "The homeowners that were bamboozled into obtaining a loan that they couldn't afford or giving terms that were unrealistic, and what's happening now is that there were many swindlers back in those days who were taking advantage of people with good credit and putting them into a situation that was really unrealistic for them to pay off their mortgage."
How does mortgage fraud work, exactly?
FBI Special Agent Alaniz: "Mortgage fraud is certainly where someone has taken out a loan and has not used the proceeds of that money for what it was intended to. For example, you have mortgage fraud where people are falsely inflating the appraisal of their home, withdrawing the money and not using that money for what they had asked for or flipping homes. There's many people involved the collapse of our housing industry."
Do you think that it's helped at all that it's not as easy to get a home loan as it was two years ago?
FBI Special Agent Alaniz: "It's much more difficult now. Government regulators have seen that there was a loophole in many of the loans that people were able to obtain. For example, there were loans where you didn't have to show proof of employment. Now they're asking for much more documentation, down payments and people really have to show that they have the abilities to pay these loans off."
If you have a tip for the FBI, call the bureau's Mortgage Fraud Hotline is (210) 650-6777.
