The next 144 months in the life of Mitchel A. Fuchs will be spent in prison after the 41-year-old officer was convicted and sentenced for a mortgage fraud scheme that may have cost lenders hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In December 2007, Fuchs was indicted on thirteen counts of wire fraud and one count of mail fraud. Folllowing a seven-day trial, an Illinois jury found him guilty on all fourteen counts in November 2008. Also charged in the indictment were 59-year-old Frank G. Anast and 26-year-old Jessica L. Gibson. The trio allegedly defrauded commercial lenders by causing unqualified loan applicants to receive commercial loans.
According to the indictment, Fuchs worked as a loan officer at two mortgage brokerage companies in Rockford, Illinois: Mortgage Solutions, from 2002 through August of 2004, and Leader Mortgage, August 2004 through October 2005. Both Mortgage Solutions and Leader Mortgage earned fees by assisting customers in obtaining mortgage-backed loans from commercial lenders.
From February 2004 through August 2004, Gibson worked for Fuchs as a loan processor at Mortgage Solutions, while Anast was self-employed doing computer work. At Mortgage Solutions, Fuchs defrauded several commercial lenders by deceiving them into funding loans for unqualified loan applicants.
Fuchs altered credit reports, pay stubs and W-2’s for various clients with the help of Gibson, in addition to paying Anast to create fictitious pay stubs and W-2s for other loan customers.
He created fictitious cashier’s checks and official bank checks to falsely suggest that his loan customers had invested their own funds in the properties they were purchasing.
Fuchs and Gibson created fraudulent investment statements in order to show that loan customers had sufficient funds available to close on the loans they were seeking.
According to the indictment, Fuchs continued to commit fraud after he left Mortgage Solutions and went to work at Leader Mortgage. Fuchs received commissions on the loans he arranged for unqualified applicants, placing various commercial lenders at risk of losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In February 2008, Anast pled guilty to one count of wire fraud and was sentenced in November to five years of probation - including ten months of which are to be served on home confinement - and ordered to pay $87,000 in restitution.
Gibson pled guilty to one count of wire fraud in May 2008 and was sentenced in November to four years of probation - two months of which are under home confinement - and ordered her to pay $29,510.24 in restitution.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Frederick J. Kapala sentenced Fuchs, who also sometimes goes by “Mike Fox,” to 12 years of imprisonment Judge Kapala also sentenced Fuchs to pay $183,890 in restitution and a special assessment of $1400.
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