Two down, thousands to go (or, Eloise Anderson’s amazing summer)

PD this morning:

A Solon builder who has been tied to mortgage fraud has agreed to get out of the construction business as part of his punishment.

Edward Emery Jr. pleaded guilty Thursday to submitting a false loan application for a woman who bought a $490,000 home on Sedge Circle in Solon that he built. Emery also admitted to similar schemes involving 37 homes that he built in Solon and Glenwillow.

Eloise Anderson of Richmond Heights pleaded guilty to using bogus job and income information to buy the Solon house, two houses in Cleveland and another house in Pepper Pike — closing more than $1.3 million in deals over a five-month span in 2005.

Emery was not connected to Anderson’s other homes, Assistant Prosecutor Michael Jackson said. A title company owner, a mortgage broker and two officials from another mortgage company also face charges in the case.

Anderson, a 60-year-old postal clerk, was passed off as a postal inspector earning twice her $55,000 salary.
She planned to quickly dispose of the homes under rent-to-own deals, Jackson said. Solon police broke the case when neighbors on Sedge Circle complained that the tenants were not keeping up the property.

Here’s the indictment, courtesy of the excellent Mortgage Fraud Blog.

So who lent Eloise Anderson all that money?

• For the house on Sedge Circle in Solon, she got $490,000 from Argent Mortgage. Then seven weeks later she got a $392,000 mortgage from First National Bank of Arizona, which somehow allowed her to pay off Argent. (This mortgage was sold a year later to Deutsche Bank — apparently serving as trustee for an entity involving JP Morgan Chase, because these two companies were co-plaintiffs in the foreclosure action against Anderson that resulted in the sheriff’s sale of the Sedge Circle house a couple of weeks ago.)
• To buy the two houses in Cleveland, at 3606 West 45th and 4081 East 64th, she got a total of $177,210 from Long Beach Mortgage, a major subprime subsidiary of Washington Mutual of Seattle.
• Finally, Anderson got $650,000 from Meritage Mortgage of Jacksonville to buy 2485 Lander Road in Pepper Pike, apparently with zero down payment. Meritage is a now-defunct subprime subsidiary of the now-also-defunct NetBank. (This mortgage was also acquired by Deutsche Bank, as trustee for an unidentified entity, in January 2007. It’s about to go to sheriff’s sale, too.)

The First National of Arizona and Meritage loans were actually provided by Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., which would have gotten the applications from the local mortgage broker(s) working with Anderson, signed up the two lenders, and then peddled the paper to Deutsche Bank.

Anderson got all of these mortgages approved between the beginning of May and the end of September, 2005!

None of the lenders listed above are implicated in Anderson and Co.’s fraud — in fact, they’re mostly listed in the indictment as victims. But think about it: She faked her income, faked her credit, applied to borrow a million and a half dollars in five separate steps over a five-month period, from four different subprime lenders, and they all bought it.

Maybe they were all just too busy to notice.

Or maybe they liked what they saw.