Three mortgage brokers formerly from the Portland area were charged with mortgage fraud by a federal grand jury earlier this year.

Michael Han, Joel Surprenant and Benjamin Lucescu were each charged with one count of acquiring mortgage loans by falsifying loan applications and with fraudulent intent.  The three cases are just a small part of a nationwide effort by the feds to identify and bring mortgage fraudsters to justice.  Many of the thousands of cases being investigated by the FBI were referred to them by professionals in the mortgage industry.

Providing false information on loan applications was fairly easy and somewhat common throughout the mortgage boom.  Accepted as just part of the industry were the stated income loans, often called “liar’s loans,” where lenders made little effort, if any, to verify a borrower’s stated financial condition.

Now that the real estate bubble has burst, many of the lenders who approved stated income loans are now the tattle-tales passing on information of the defaulted loans to law enforcement.  Portland’s U.S. Attorney’s office has put in place a plan to streamline the abundant cases coming in.  Assistant U.S. Attorney Lance Caldwell stated that mortgage fraud cases are mounting in numbers, and estimated that the local Portland office could process up to several dozen of those cases.

Han was a mortgage broker for TTM Finance when he carried out his alleged fraud in February of 2007.  Feds say he submitted a loan application that claimed false financial qualifications for the borrower.

Surprenant, a mortgage broker with Morgan Financial, was accused by the grand jury of submitting a mortgage application in August of 2006 where he inflated his income using falsified documents.  Allegedly, he presented fake pay stubs and overstated the purchase price of the property that he was buying.  His intent, feds claim, was to receive a portion of the sale price from the seller upon closing the sale of the property.

American Capital Mortgage Corporation was the company for which Lucescu worked when he committed his alleged fraud.  From March 2004 through June 2007, Lucescu is accused of arranging five different loans for the same borrower, providing false information for her assets and liabilities and indicating that each home would be the primary residence.  The feds claim the homes were bought as investments.