A Colorado mortgage broker who pleaded guilty in a state court to leading a $20 million fraud ring will spend no time in state prison for his crimes.
Jose Alfredo Ramirez, 28, who was indicted by a grand jury and pleaded guilty to fraud charges, will skip the jail time as long as he stays out of trouble.
Jefferson County District Judge sentenced Ramirez to four years in prison, but suspended the sentence on the condition that Ramirez not break any more laws, said Pam Russell, public information officer for the Jefferson and Gilpin counties district attorney’s office.
“If he is caught doing any little thing he will go to prison,” Russell told MortgageDaily.com, adding that the sentence includes 400 hours of community service that Ramirez must perform for Habitat for Humanity.
Ramirez does face up to five months in prison on similar federal charges, she said.
Ramirez, who operated his mortgage brokerage out of Lakewood, Colo., was one of four people indicted in September on fraud charges, according to a statement from the district attorney’s office.
The other three have been identified as Perla Alvarado, Lucina Loma and Ludibeth Salazar.
“The three were employed by metro-area mortgage firms and engaged in the sale of residential property under the general supervision of Ramirez,” according to the statement. “Transactions in the indictment involve loans for 117 homes totaling over $20 million.”
Ramirez and “his team” made $550,000 in commissions on the fraudulent transactions, prosecutors charged.
Ramirez allegedly used phony documents as part of his scheme to qualify people for the fraudulent loans, which were backed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“It was the regular practice of Ramirez and his sales agents to solicit potential home buyers who, because of their limited assets and income, or because they did not have legal presence in the United States, did not qualify for FHA loans,” according to a copy of the indictment.
“In a lawful real estate transaction, these facts would be discovered by the loan officer, who would decline to seek financing for such a home buyer and would inform the Realtor that the home buyer did not qualify for a loan,” the indictment states.
Authorities were tipped off about the scheme after the state’s Gaming Unit received complaints from a Colorado casino that “unknown persons had forged documents which stated that the home buyers were employed by the casino,” prosecutors said.
Those documents were used to secure some of the loans, they said.
The indictment of Ramirez and the others was actually part of a larger fraud investigation that resulted in charges against 11 people.
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A Colorado mortgage broker and three of his loan officers have been indicted in an alleged large scale mortgage fraud scheme that involves more than $20 million in loans and 117 homes.
