Texas Mortgage Fraud Flipper Gets 25 Years; Prosecutor Credits "Citizen Sleuth" For Key Effort In Busting Scam Ring

In McKinney, Texas, The Dallas Morning News reports:

• Jocelyn Sapp smelled a rat. She noticed a vacant house with overgrown weeds in her McKinney neighborhood, then another and another. Sapp started sleuthing, checking county records on the deteriorating homes. The results startled her. One house, listed for sale at $437,500, had sold for $643,500. Another that had been on the market for $319,000 sold for $490,000. "I thought, could they possibly have sold for that much?" Sapp said.

• Eventually, 11 houses on Hills Creek Drive changed hands and then went into foreclosure. That's one-tenth of the residences on the hilly, mile-long street with landscaped lawns and tall trees. [...] Sapp, a retired systems engineer, studied the transactions and saw the same names pop up again and again. Some addresses were in Florida. She didn't understand it all, but she knew something was wrong. She compiled the property records into a binder and handed it to prosecutors. That was three years ago.

• The resulting investigation culminated last week in a 25-year prison sentence for John Barry, who was behind the mortgage fraud that led to all those sales and foreclosures, which, prosecutors said, caused millions of dollars in damage to the neighborhood. [...] Prosecutors applauded Sapp for sniffing out the scam and alerting authorities. "If not for Jocelyn Sapp's vigilance, this never would have happened," Assistant District Attorney Ben Smith said after the conviction. [...] Sapp's work, Smith said, "gave us the names of lenders and title companies we could subpoena documents from." He said, "She was instrumental in our investigation."

For the story, see Jocelyn Sapp's work helped put mortgage scammer behind bars.

See also, Man gets 25 years for mortgage fraud scheme in McKinney's Stonebridge Ranch community.