Co-Conspirator Of San Diego-Area Loan Modification Racket That Used Figurehead Attorney As A Paid Dummy To Hold Itself Out As Law Firm Gets Off w/ Only Nine Months In Prison; Over 1000 Financially Struggling Homeowners Were Ripped Off Of $3.5+ Million

From the Office of the U.S. Attorney (San Diego, California):

• San Diego businessman Michael Nazarinia was sentenced [] to 9 months in custody for his role in a fraudulent mortgage loan modification business that duped hundreds of struggling homeowners.
  
  The business, known as “Haffar & Associates,” owned by figurehead attorney Mohamed Haffar, recruited new customers using telemarketers who lied to clients in order to induce more than 1,000 people to sign up to pay more than $3.5 million in total.
  
  Haffar & Associates Scheme
  
  Nazarinia’s co-conspirator Charles Rose managed a call center staffed with as many as 30 telemarketers, whose job was to recruit new clients. Rose trained the telemarketers, wrote telemarketing scripts for use on calls with potential clients, wrote form letters for the salespeople to send to potential clients, and recorded his own sales calls for telemarketers to emulate. Rose pleaded guilty in July, admitting that he and his business partners, including Nazarinia, trained telemarketers to make statements to potential clients that were false, such as the following: [more]
  
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  Despite the representations made to clients, attorney Haffar did not directly supervise Nazarinia’s case managers, and instead, Nazarinia and the case managers provided legal services to clients without Haffar’s input or direction.
  
  Haffar rarely reviewed the clients’ files and almost never provided direction to the case managers.
  
  According to Rose’s plea agreement, Haffar, Nazarinia, and Rose all understood that Haffar’s fees were his compensation for the risk he took in allowing Nazarinia and Rose to use his name, bar license, and law firm, and not for any actual work Haffar did on loan modification cases.

For more, see Manager of Predatory Loan Modification “Law Firm” Sentenced to Prison.