They are the Bonnie and Clyde of mortgage scams.
Federal agents and police in Georgia and Florida are on the lookout for a couple on a crime spree involving stolen identities, phony mortgage documents and as much as $4.5 million in stolen cash.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Georgia and the U.S. Secret Service have sent out wanted posters of the alleged operators of the scam, Matthew Cox, 35, and Rebecca Hauck, 33.
“Thought you might want to advise our agents and share with other (offices) if you can since we do not know where they are operating now,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Gale McKenzie said in an alert to federal agents.
The alert accompanied the wanted posters.
Both are known to use a number of aliases. Cox goes by Michael Shanahan, David Freeman, Gerald Scott Cugno, Maxwell Price, Bevan Cox, Michael White, Kevin White and James Redd. Hauck has gone by Grace Hudson, Rebecca Wylie and Theresa Knight.
Anyone with information is asked to contact the Secret Service in Atlanta at 404.331.6111.
The pair has been operating in Atlanta since December of last year, and was engaged in criminal activity as recently as July, Malcolm Wylie, spokesman for the Secret Service in Atlanta, told MortgageDaily.com.
Agents believe Cox and Hauck stole about $800,000 through phony home equity loans in Atlanta, but from $2.5 million to $4.5 million in Florida, Wylie said.
The pair may be in Atlanta, or they could have headed back to Florida. Wylie said authorities also have information they may be in or traveling to Alabama.
“We honestly don’t know,” he said. “That’s why we put out the posters.”
Wylie said the scam works like this.
Cox and Hauck rent houses use their phony names, some of which come from identities they’ve stolen.
Once they are in the house they create forged documents that removes the owner’s lien on the house, and then file those papers at a county clerk’s office.
The removal of a lien is called a “cancellation” in Georgia; in Florida, it is known as a “satisfaction,” Wylie said.
“Then they go out and apply for home equity loans for 50, 60 or even 70% of value of the house,” he said. “Many times they run the same scheme on one house multiple times.”
On one Atlanta area house the pair of con artists had three home equity loans all working at once.
The loans, of course, are never paid off. And the true owners receive foreclosure notices, never knowing that the bogus loans were taken in the first place, Wylie said.
Atlanta’s News 11 Alive reported that both suspects may now look different — with Hauck apparently having spent more than $12,000 on plastic surgery last spring.
