The Morning Report
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Every now and then, the steady hum of earnest hard work in the voiceofsandiego.org newsroom is split by a blood-curdling sound emanating from the north end of the office.
“Moooooorrrttttgggaaaagggggeeeee FFFrrrrraaauuuuddd,” screeches Scott Lewis in his best impression of a Shakespeare-urchin-English accent.
We’re not sure why that particular phrase fascinates him so much, but to keep my (co-executive) editor happy, I visited the lovely Rachel Dollar’s Mortgage Fraud blog and dug up a tidbit about San Diego.
Dollar is reporting that a San Diego woman was recently sentenced to 30 months in federal custody after being convicted of bank fraud arising from her division of the proceeds of foreclosures.
Maria De Lourdes Navarro, Dollar reports, was working at GreenPoint Credit Corporation in San Diego when she began illegally diverting money that she was collecting for GreenPoint to herself.
“She accomplished this diversion by virtue of her ability to negotiate settlements of outstanding mortgage balances with GreenPoint’s customers and her ability to manipulate GreenPoint’s books,” writes Dollar.
“Specifically, Navarro admitted that she falsely represented to GreenPoint customers that their mortgage obligations could be satisfied by a drastically reduced lump sum payment. She directed the payments to a collection agency, which then converted part of the payments to cashier’s checks payable to Navarro or her creditors.”
Dollar even tells us how Navarro covered up this scheme:
“Navarro admitted that she then covered up this fraud in GreenPoint’s books by falsely representing that certain outstanding balances had been paid or that certain accounts were in litigation (or were being monitored by the legal department) and that no contact should be made with the account holders. Navarro admitted that, through this scheme, she defrauded GreenPoint of approximately $249,000.”
It’s an interesting tale, made all the more interesting by the sounds that I know will soon be splitting the air just by my right ear when Scott reads it.