A former mortgage broker accused of participating in a $20 million Atlanta fraud scheme was recently arrested in Canada and is on her way back to the United States to face charges.
Earlier this month, Judith Hooper, 56, was expelled into Maine after being arrested in New Brunswick as she was illegally in Canada, according to U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesman Gentry Shelnutt in the Northern District of Georgia. She was scheduled to make an initial appearance in court Wednesday afternoon in which she would be advised of the indictment against her, he added.
Hooper, indicted last May, changed her identity to Jerry Dale Hunter and arranged for loans to be originated through mortgage brokerage firm, “American Mortgage Exchange,” before fleeing the United States in the summer of 2000, according to a government announcement. At the time of the indictment, she was known to have lived in Belize.
In addition to being charged with conspiracy, fraud and money laundering, she is accused of making material false statements to the Social Security Administration to obtain a Social Security number in the identity of a then two-year-old boy to open a Citizens Trust Bank account to receive proceeds of the mortgage fraud scheme.
Hooper was one of 13 people, including a former closing attorney for various lenders, the U.S. grand jury indicted with bilking lenders in a scheme operated from mid-1999 through March 2004, in which stolen identities, false Social Security numbers or payment to straw borrowers and false documentation were used to obtain numerous mortgage loans totaling approximately $20 million.
A Royal Canadian Mounted Police official said Hooper’s arrest followed an anonymous tip from a member of the public, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported.
Hooper is believed to have been in Canada since 2001. She operated a catering service in New Brunswick, CBC said.
Hooper underwent plastic surgery to change her appearance. Her photo on the FBI’s Most Wanted list on the Internet probably incited her arrest, antifraud activist Anne Fulmer, who contributed to the scheme’s unveiling and ultimately Hooper’s arrest, told MortgageDaily.com.
Regarding Hooper’s apprehension, Fulmer said she was “really happy because [the fraud ring] did a lot of damage to a lot of people,” as the $20 million in losses caused to bankers, excluded the enormous damages to neighborhoods and their residents.
Fulmer, president of the Georgia Real Estate Fraud Prevention and Awareness Coalition, said she learned about the scheme thanks to a woman who lived in a DeKalb County neighborhood close to hers. The woman was leasing a property and received a notice of foreclosure that did not list the person she was making payments to as the property owner. The woman’s suspicions heightened when she found that other residents in the area were also having the same problem. She contacted Fulmer and they informed authorities of the situation.
It was ultimately found that a group had been working on property flipping affecting about 20 properties, Fulmer said. Each of the properties was sold twice on the same day, where usually a home with a first price of $175,000 would sell for a price of $277,000 — “that was the magic number” as it fit within conforming limits, she added.
The perpetrators would recruit, pay or otherwise induce straw sellers, or locate identities to use as straw sellers, to falsely claim current ownership of the properties sold to straw borrowers at highly inflated amounts, according to the indictment announcement. Afterward, they’d purchase the just-sold property for a much lower amount and share the artificially inflated loan amount through disbursements to themselves and their shell companies.
