Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Headline: A Dishonest Broker
“This is a consumer crime as much as anything,” said Caldwell. “For a lot of these families, their mortgages were sold on the secondary market, so the new lender was not always willing to adjust the terms of the loan they were fraudulently sold. Some victims are delinquent and are at risk of losing their homes.”
The sky-high fees enriched Nassida, who owned a $1.3 million home, a vacation home, and various high-end cars. Some of his successful loan officers, who also made hefty commissions, started their own brokerages.
Law enforcement had been looking into suspect mortgage brokers and real estate professionals around the region prior to the formation of the task force, but the coordinated efforts of the task force in running down leads, following paper trails, executing search warrants, and developing cooperating witnesses led investigators to uncovering the fraud at Century III.
With the expertise on mortgage fraud the team had developed over years of investigating these cases, task force members learned to spot loan documents that were most likely to be fraudulent and focused resources on those loans, including tracking down and interviewing those victim borrowers.
“The more we looked into it, the more we realized this crime was not subtle. It was blatant fraud, and we used the tried and true approach when dealing with any criminal enterprise,” Caldwell said. “With so many people in on it, someone’s going to talk. You gather the intelligence and you identify someone to approach who has the access or knowledge of the crime and is likely to cooperate with the investigation.”
Nassida pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud last year, and in January, he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison. Caldwell said many of the employees, including Nassida, ultimately accepted responsibility for their actions.
While only a handful of victim borrowers were able to be interviewed as part of the case, there could be many more who were unknowingly cheated.
“Every borrower I interviewed said, ‘I trusted these people,’ and they blame themselves. But really, no one understands every page of complex mortgage documents. You have to have some trust in their expertise, and that trust was abused,” Caldwell said. “Even members of our own investigative team dug out their own mortgage paperwork to see if they had been gouged unknowingly after developing a familiarity and expertise with the paperwork.”