LAS VEGAS – The economy goes up and down, and in good times or bad, people look to commit real estate and mortgage fraud on credit unions and other financial institutions.
That was the message from Glen Ogden, VP-mortgage lending for Appleton, Wis.-based Community First Credit Union. Ogden detailed a number of devious practices at ACUMA’s Annual Conference here Thursday, ranging from foreclosure prevention schemes to straw buyers to income and employment verification fraud. “Fraudsters only have to be right one time to cost an institution a large amount of money,” he said. “Financial institutions, loan officers and fraud specialists have to be right 100% of the time.”
Ogden later told Credit Union Journal different types of fraud become used more or less depending on economic conditions. For example, property flipping fraud has diminished greatly now that home values are stagnant or sagging, depending on the market. “Income, employment and asset verification fraud is much more prevalent in down times because people are desperate,” he explained. “Because there was such a boom, and values had increased so rapidly for so long, it hid a lot of fraud. People could just refinance if they were in trouble, and a lot of problems just went away. But now they can’t.”
