A Maryland woman has pleaded guilty to a federal wire fraud charge for creating false documents and impersonating a servicer in an attempt to hide a $111K lien in the sale of her home, prosecutors say.
Tammy Jones, also known as Tammy Taylor, 53, of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, will be sentenced by a federal judge in May for sending false documents to an unnamed settlement company and posing as an employee of the unnamed Department of Housing and Urban Development loan servicer in securing the sale of her Brandywine, Md. home in 2018. She was also ordered to pay $111K in restitution to HUD.
An attorney listed for Jones didn’t respond to a request for comment Friday morning.
Jones bought the home in 2011 and obtained a $360,660 Federal Housing Administration-backed loan from an unnamed lender, according to prosecutors. In 2017, Jones sought a loan modification through HUD’s Partial Claim Program, in which HUD pays a portion of the outstanding mortgage balance while the borrower stays in the home and agrees to repay HUD. The department made a $111K partial claim payment to the servicer, while Jones entered a loan modification agreement with the lender for the $352K principal and agreed to monthly payments of $2,564.96.
In 2018, Jones tried to sell the property for $429K and an unnamed settlement company sought proof Jones had closed the lien. Prosecutors say the lien had not been released, and Jones created false documents including a bogus lien release document and a fraudulent email account purporting to be an employee of the HUD-contracted servicer to repeatedly contact the settlement company and tell them the lien had been satisfied.
The settlement company permitted the sale in 2018, and the homebuyer was notified of the outstanding lien in 2019, prompting the investigation. Jones faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and up to three years of supervised release for the single fraud charge.
The mortgage-lending industry is increasingly at-risk to fraudulent activity, with fraud costing the industry 33% more since 2019, according to a recent LexisNexis Risk Solutions study. Earlier this week, an Atlanta-area real estate agent was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for his role in a scheme that cost his employer and the FHA over $1 million combined. Feds earlier this month also stepped into a short-sale fraud case involving FHA-insured mortgages.
