Just how hard is it to investigate and find a fraudulent real estate transaction?

There have been a number of rumors circulating over the last few months surrounding the circumstances of convicted fraudster John Romney's mortgage fraud case and the arrangements that were afforded to him in exchange for testimony against other people he worked with throughout his criminal career. I have to wonder though, why in the world would any law enforcement agency need to make a deal with someone who's involved in a paperwork intensive crime like Mortgage Fraud? After all, the evidence is all there on paper and recorded with not just the banks that financed the deals but also with the county recorders office among others. To give you an idea of just how easy it is to build one of these cases, let's give ourselves five minutes online and see what we can come up with.


Let's start with Mr. Romney, at the very least we know that he ran the Bernardo Barrera mortgage fraud deal through a company he owned that was called "Property Collateral", let's run that through the Florida Division of corporations website to see if that's correct...

Bingo. Now we've confirmed that Mr. Romney did indeed own a company called Property Collateral Inc. Now consider that any deed, mortgage or quit claim deed that's filed in Miami Dade County has to be filed with the County Recorders Office, so let's go to their website and search to see what Property Collateral has been up to...

We find 23 recorded documents from our search of the County Recorders office, most interesting though is the item highlighted in yellow, a deed that was recorded on 8/3/10. That deed strikes me as strange, what kind of real estate transaction would Mr. Romney be conducting when he knows he's about to go to jail, especially when every move he makes is under close scrutiny by law enforcement? Let's pull up that deed and see what we find...

Uh Oh! Does anyone see the problem in those docs? If you can't, take another look and pay specific attention to the dates. Amazing how we were able to find all this in less than five minutes without a badge or subpoena powers or even a cooperating witness. We'll discuss in detail tomorrow...