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 FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION REPORT

convictions for mortgage fraud. In , the FBI started specifically tracking mort-
gage fraud cases and increased personnel dedicated to those efforts. And in ,
Operation Malicious Mortgage resulted in  mortgage fraud cases in which 
defendants were charged by U.S. Attorneys offices throughout the country. 
William Black told the Commission that Washington essentially ignored the issue
and allowed it to worsen. “The FBI did have severe limits,” because of the need to re-
spond to the / attacks, Black said, and the problem was compounded by the lack
of cooperation: “The terrible thing that happened was that the FBI got virtually no
assistance from the regulators, the banking regulators and the thrift regulators.” 
Swecker, the former FBI official, told the Commission he had no contact with bank-
ing regulators during his tenure. 
As mortgage fraud grew, state agencies took action. In Florida, Ellen Wilcox, a
special agent with the state Department of Law Enforcement, teamed with the Tampa
police department and Hillsborough County Consumer Protection Agency to bring
down a criminal ring scamming homeowners in the Tampa area. Its key member was
Orson Benn, a New York–based vice president of Argent Mortgage Company, a unit
of Ameriquest. Beginning in ,  investigators and two prosecutors worked for
years to unravel a network of alliances between real estate brokers, appraisers, home
repair contractors, title companies, notaries, and a convicted felon in a case that in-
volved some  loans. 
According to charging documents in the case, the perpetrators would walk
through neighborhoods, looking for elderly homeowners they thought were likely to
have substantial equity in their homes. They would suggest repairs or improvements
to the homes. The homeowners would fill out paperwork, and insiders would use the
information to apply for loans in their names. Members of the ring would prepare
fraudulent loan documents, including false W- forms, filled with information about
invented employment and falsified salaries, and take out home equity loans in the
homeowners’ names. Each person involved in the transaction would receive a fee for
his or her role; Benn, at Argent, received a , kickback for each loan he helped
secure. When the loan was funded, the checks were frequently made out to the bogus
home construction company that had proposed the work, which would then disap-
pear with the proceeds. Some of the homeowners never received a penny from the
refinancing on their homes. Hillsborough County officials learned of the scam when
homeowners approached them to say that scheduled repairs had never been made to
their homes, and then sometimes learned that they had lost years’ worth of equity as
well. Sixteen of  defendants, including Benn, have been convicted or have pled
guilty. 
Wilcox told the Commission that the “cost and length of these investigations
make them less attractive to most investigative agencies and prosecutors trying to
justify their budgets based on investigative statistics.” She said it has been hard to

follow up on other cases because so many of the subprime lenders have gone out of
business, making it difficult to track down perpetrators and witnesses. Ameriquest,
for example, collapsed in , although Argent, and the company’s loan-servicing
arm, were bought by Citigroup that same year.