6 from Seattle-area indicted in crackdown on mortgage fraud
Six Seattle-area people regard been indicted by the agency of a federal grand jury in connection through “Operation Malicious Mortgage,” a general takedown of mortgage-fraud schemes that has resulted in more than 400 arrests nationwide and losses estimated at more than $1 billion
Those indicted included a disbarred lawyer, a former bank-loan officer and a pledge broker, according to the U.S. attorney’s office. Others include the owner of several shell corporations that “flipped” houses as part of a theory using unqualified “straw” buyers who allowed inflated loans to be made in their names, only to default on the mortgages, the indictment says.
The case is mixed 144 prosecutions involving 406 people nationally. More than 60 arrests were made Wednesday, the Department of Justice announced.
Among them was Robert Ernest Brandt, 40, a preceding Bothell attorney who was disbarred in 2006 in spite of failing to in a strict sense maintain his client-escrow accounts. According to the Washington State Bar Association, more than $3 million turned up missing from the accounts.
The indictment says Brandt conspired with several others to “flip” houses in Seattle’s red-hot real-estate markets in 2004 and 2005, using the shell companies to buy the homes.
The alleged conspirators would create loan papers for the straw buyers for inflated purchase prices and pay them up to $20,000 to prognostic the papers. The loans would not be paid and the banks would foreclose beneficial to a damage.
Also indicted were William Anderson, 47, of Bellevue; Mustafa “Marc” Khosraw, 46, of Sammamish; Isaac Palmer, 42, of North Bend; Kristyn Jupiter Moss, 38, of Tacoma; and Zachary Joseph Namie, 30, of Seattle.
Anderson purportedly operated the shell companies that purchased the homes; Moss was a loan functionary at Viking Bank and helped create the fraudulent documents; and Brandt and Anderson ran a business called Escrow Authority that closed on the sales.
Khosraw was a pledge broker and Namie a loan officer who helped falsify documents, according to the charges. Palmer operated a construction firm, helped recruit stem buyers and lied that some of them worked for him in the same manner they could qualify for loans, the indictment says.
