How About Them Fraudsters? Former Cowboy Lockhart Faces 10 Years After Mortgage Fraud Conviction
Lockhart was involved with real estate entities, some formed by him and Tisdale, which had names that were often derived in some fashion from a reference to the Dallas Cowboys, including America’s Team Mortgage; America’s Team Realty; America’s Team Funding Group; Ace Mortgage; Cowboys Realty; Cowboys Mortgage and KLT Properties. Tisdale was involved with Pinnacle Development and Realty Corporation; Atilla Capital Corporation; and KLT Properties. Jones was involved with Pinnacle Development and Realty Corporation and Atilla Capital Corporation.
The defendants ran a scheme in which they located single-family residences for sale in the Dallas area, including distressed and pre-foreclosure properties, and negotiated a sales price with the seller. They created surplus loan proceeds by inflating the sales price to an arbitrary amount substantially more than the fair market value of the residence.
Generally, they recruited individuals to act as nominee or straw purchasers or straw borrowers, promising to pay them a bonus or commission of between $10,000 and $20,000 for their participation in a particular real estate transaction. The conspirators caused the loan applications for each straw borrower to include false financial information, often including inflated false income figures to conceal the borrower’s true financial condition so that the lender would more likely approve the loan. The conspirators concealed from the lenders the true status, financial condition and intentions of the named borrowers, knowing that loans would not likely be approved if the lender knew the true role, credit worthiness and risk of each straw borrower. The conspirators falsely represented in loan documents that the straw purchaser intended to use the property as their primary residence, intentionally concealing from the lender that each straw borrower viewed himself as an “investor,” who never intended to occupy the home.
Some of the conspirators also caused bogus and fraudulent “marketing fees” to be listed on loan closing documents to provide a means for the conspirators to receive surplus/excess loan proceeds. The scope of the conspiracy involved approximately 54 fraudulent residential property loan closings resulting in the funding of approximately $20.5 million in fraudulent loans. The actual loss to lenders is nearly $3 million.
Full story here…
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well send them to florida. tampa bay area especially. i have a straw buyer as a comp on my appraisal. wonder why underwriting didnt see and throw it our…oh thats right underwriting standards were losend. so the straw buyers collected 20k oin the house on my comp. fraudulently increasing the price of my home. oh nice. this crap has to stop being reported on. this helps us none we know we have all been have been scrooded and of game over. start reporting on solutions . what are you going to do to fix this mess, wake up the judges, and our congress.?
Head them up move them out Rawhide.Thats about as good as it gets.Maybe they should stick to the known entity …horses.Much more level playing field for them.
Joe –
That was funny. Sad but true. How dare they? Only banksters and their minions get to commit fraud and escape penalty.
Um? What does this have to do with the real problem?
Oh! I see! They get a prison sentence while the more appropriate fraudsters don’t?
Dumb cowboys – should have worked for a bank.
Funny one, Joe! I needed a good laugh for the day!