A former loan coordinator at Washington Mutual F.A.’s subprime unit was bribed with $100,000 in payments from a mortgage broker to help process fraudulent loan packages. He also was paid by in-house loan officers to fund mortgages with fraud.
John Ngo pleaded guilty Monday to lying under oath to a grand jury in September about whether he had received money from a mortgage broker while he was a senior loan coordinator at WaMu subsidiary Long Beach Mortgage, according to an announcement from U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott.
Ngo, who worked at Long Beach from September 2001 through May 2006, was responsible for verifying information from packages submitted by brokers and inside originators.
While he originally testified he hadn’t received any money from the broker, records subsequently obtained from Bank of America indicated Ngo received around $100,000 in checks and bank transfers from bank accounts controlled by the broker.
“Ngo admitted that most of the payments he received from the broker were payments made for ensuring that fraudulent loan applications referred to Long Beach Mortgage by the mortgage broker’s firm were processed and funded,” the statement said.
The case involves Iftikhar Ahmad, who was arrested in August, and his company I&R Investment Properties LLC. Ahmad allegedly sold San Joaquin Valley area properties to straw buyers — collecting more than $1.5 million in proceeds.
The fraudulent information submitted included employment, income and identification documents.
Ngo also reportedly admitted that he took payments from originators employed at Long Beach to help push fraudulent packages through the loan process or help “fix” the loan packages by creating fake documents.
As part of his guilty plea, Ngo will help investigators for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service in an ongoing investigation that has already yielded several other indictments.
Ngo, a resident of Dublin, Calif., faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine at his sentencing scheduled for April 7, 2008 — though the judge will take his cooperation into consideration.
