Upfront Fee Foreclosure Rescue Operator Evades Cops As Girlfriend, Two Associates Left Holding The Bag In Alleged Fraud Scheme

In Las Vegas, Nevada, the Las Vegas Sun reports:

• [Jeffery] Brown is among the first [foreclosure] consultants the [state] attorney general’s new mortgage fraud task force has charged. Investigators said Brown would sift through assessor records looking for people who had fallen behind in their mortgage payments and then contact them by mail.

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• In March, about a dozen investigators from the attorney general’s office searched Brown’s high-rent Horizon Ridge Parkway offices. Brown wasn’t there. He had purchased a plane ticket to the Philippines and is believed to have boarded a flight shortly after the search. Airline ticket agents told investigators he appeared willing to pay almost anything to board the next flight.

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• The search of Brown’s offices yielded a cache of information. Authorities say they uncovered a larger mortgage fraud scheme involving Brown and his girlfriend, Cindy Birkland, with whom Brown shared a Henderson home purchased for $1.8 million in 2005. The two are accused in a criminal complaint of lying on loan applications, forging documents to skim cash from loan deals and, along with two associates, Bryan Sears and Claudia Koziol, pocketing nearly $100,000 in phony construction loan proceeds.

• Brown remains at large. Birkland, Sears and Koziol face more than 30 charges of theft, forgery and racketeering and are out on bail.

For more, see If they want money to fight foreclosure, it may be scam (State attorney general targets fraudulent ‘consultants’).