Short Paper 3
Benjamin Werbiskis
Southern New Hampshire University
Long Island Man Pleads Guilty to Mortgage Fraud Scheme
In this case the defendant, Brent Kaufman, plead guilty to mortgage fraud after taking
nearly $5 million in mortgage refinancing funds. Kaufman worked as an unlicensed mortgage
broker and helped clients to refinance their mortgages. He took the money to pay off existing
loans by providing wire information that would send the money to accounts owned by himself
rather than the mortgage company. This caused several of the victim's homes to be foreclosed on.
Situations such as this are likely to happen more frequently due to the drop in interest rates over
the last few years allowing for more people to refinance their loans and in turn be taken
advantage of. By Kaufman taking the money for his own and not putting it towards the loans it
was intended for he immediately becomes liable as a fraudster. Having the broker being the sole
person in charge of handling the payment information was one of the weaknesses present that
allowed the mortgage fraud to occur. Another weakness was trusting an unlicensed broker to
handle the transaction in a professional manner. Separation of duties would have been a great
step in preventing the situation from occurring. If the mortgage company or another third party
handled the payments it would have been much less likely that Kaufman could get his hands on
the money at all. The red flags that spelled the end for this fraud were the foreclosures on
homeowners that had no other issues in the past. This would have caused the appropriate people
to look into where the money went, and it would have been easily solved.
Works Cited
Long island man pleads guilty to mortgage fraud scheme. The United States Department of
Justice. (2021, August 31). Retrieved November 27, 2021, from https://www.justice.gov/usao-
edny/pr/long-island-man-pleads-guilty-mortgage-fraud-scheme.