Ex-Mortgage Broker Gets 9+ Years In Subprime, Straw Buyer Mortgage & Foreclosure Rescue Scams Involving $200M+ In Fraudulently Obtained Loans

In New York City, The Wall Street Journal reports:

• A one-time mortgage broker was sentenced to more than nine years in prison Thursday after pleading guilty last year in a home-foreclosure rescue scheme and in a separate scheme to defraud subprime lenders. Aleksander Lipkin was sentenced to 110 months in prison, to be followed by five years supervised release at a hearing [...] in Manhattan. He also was ordered to forfeit $7 million and to pay $11.6 million in restitution.

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• Prosecutors had alleged that Lipkin, from 2004 to 2007, was a leader of a scheme to defraud subprime and other lenders by using so-called "straw buyers" and submitting false information to lenders on loan applications. The scheme involved at least $200 million in loans, prosecutors said. Twenty-six people have pleaded guilty or been convicted of criminal charges in the subprime scheme.

• The government also had alleged Lipkin participated in a separate home foreclosure rescue scheme involving more than $20 million in loans. The scam allegedly targeted homeowners facing foreclosure - primarily in Brooklyn and the Bronx - between November 2003 and April 2005, prosecutors said.

For more, see Ex-Mortgage Broker Sentenced To 110 Mos In Subprime Scam (may require subscription; if no subscription, try here, then click link for the story).

For the U.S. Attorney (New York - Southern District) press release, see EIGHT SENTENCED IN MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR MORTGAGE FRAUD AND FORECLOSURE RESCUE SCHEMES.

In a related, February 9, 2009 New York Law Journal story on one of the attorneys that was embroiled in this scam, see N.Y. Attorney Convicted of Mortgage Fraud (Alexander M. Kaplan, 34, of Lerner & Kaplan, sat stoically at the defense table while a jury of 10 women and two men pronounced him guilty on all 18 counts in an indictment charging him with conspiracy and bank, mail and wire fraud).