Jason Madow Mortgage Fraud – A Lesson for Everyone

Jason Madow the Mortgage Broker and his partner cum friend Willy Croone was wily and cunning as his name. They both ran a company called the 21st Century Mortgage Firm together in California. Willy felt that a mortgage firm is an easy way to trick people into giving their company huge sums of money, without even realizing the fraud behind it. And he was right too, but what he didn’t realize that money earned through unethical means will come to an end one day, if not sooner than later. Here is where he went wrong.

Whatever it is if any criminal knows the future he wouldn’t get into the scam at all, similarly with Willy, he somehow coaxed his friend and partner Jason into it. They started off by convincing a lot of mortgage lenders into financing for a lot of hotels, which were on the brink of bankruptcy. There’s nothing wrong in this, but what they did was they hiked the price of these hotels and portrayed it to their lenders.

Two years into this scam, both were caught in 2001. Willy was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment and Jason to 3 ½ years’ imprisonment and both of them had to pay a fine of $250,000 also. They were sentenced to 150 hours of community work too along with their punishment of paying fines and imprisonment too . Willy’s years of imprisonment was reduced due to Jason’s co-operative nature with the law and order officials.. Life was very good from 1999 to 2001, earning huge sums of money by scamming people. And those people didn’t even realize that they were getting straight into a scam by associating with the 21st Century Mortgage Firm.

They financed totally 4 hotels in all, 2 of the hotels they hiked the price and got lenders to mortgage their stuff to provide loan for these are running under different names and administration now. Mr. Willy Croone hiked the price of a hotel to $13 million, instead of $2.6 million and convinced a reputed company called Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. to pay the $13 million, instead of $2.6 million. He used to pay his co-conspirators too from this money, which included Jason Madow.

With the extra money in hand, Willy approached more hotels in distress and played the same old trick with them. All used to get fooled by his smart dealing and appealing talk. Of course, all hotels in distress wanted to come out of their insolvency problems. Willy and Jason approached another hotel in Arizona called the ‘The Grand Image’ and did the same, nobody could understand their scheme and hence couldn’t catch them.

The overall fraud when caught was of $67 million loan scam, which is no small amount by defrauding lenders. The judge had also ordered them to pay $100/monthly after leaving the prison also. The Jason Madow Mortgage Fraud is a famous case of its time, which throws light on modern day crimes.