Arizona Housing Counselors Nailed In Real Estate Fraud Case
Sometimes time can be toughwhen facing foreclosure, but when you go to get professional help you do not expect to get caught in a mortgage fraud ring like families in Arizona have done. The housing counselors that were supposed to be helping people work out their foreclosures instead were involved in a ring that were engaged in a multimillion dollar scam that was defrauding HUD.
HUD has a preforeclosure program that subsidizes homes that are nearing foreclosure to avoid the process. These lowlifes instead played games with their valuations to create false values and defraud the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Former housing counselors, loan officers and an escrow agent have been indicted on fraud and conspiracy charges in a scam that targeted dozens of first-time homeowners across the Phoenix metropolitan area.
The group is accused of defrauding the Department of Housing and Urban Development of $1.9 million through a pre-foreclosure scheme from 2001 to 2003, according to a grand jury indictment filed in federal court late Wednesday.
The indictment comes more than a year after Eddie Carrillo Jr. of Scottsdale-based Sahara Investments was convicted of fraudulent schemes in a case relating to the pre-foreclosure scam.
Carrillo is named as a co-conspirator in the indictment but not one of the five defendants.
According to the indictment, Carrillo and the defendants sought out homeowners who had defaulted on mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration, a division of HUD, and offered to buy their homes. via via the Arizona Daily Star

Comment by Jack Payne on 14 July 2007:
Corrupt mortgage brokers thinking up new ways to scam HUD is old hat. And, they know that time is on their side. A fundamental Law of Bureaucracy is : Any simple idea will be communicated by memo in the most complicated way. Thus, when hanky-panky surfaces, the con men still have plenty of time to finagle or flee.
–Jack Payne
http://www.sixhrs.com