For several years, I have almost daily read a couple of law firm blogs that deal with mortgage fraud and follow cases and update the reports.

Both of them today reported that a 74 year old real estate broker in Denver that was found guilty of four counts of mortgage fraud in July was sentenced to 36 months probation with 15 months of house arrrest, restitution and forced to forfeit a $44,292 judgment.

Just because I was curious, I checked this person on Colorado's website and found that she was disciplined in 1993 for falsifying information (specifically asserting she had deposits in an escrow account when she did not collect these deposits) and sentenced to a 90 day license suspension, 4 hours of additional continuing ed and a $400 fine (the italics are mine). According to the state licensing site, she still has an active license.

There are articles on Fraud Blogger and on Mortgage Fraud Blog

We constantly talk about weeding out people in our respective businesses that operate outside the bounds of good business practices and sound ethics. Unfortunately, the state licensing authority in most states is slow to revoke licenses of people like the broker in the story. You would think that someone who was found guilty by a jury six months ago would not still be licensed.