Anthony V. Weis, age 45, of Phoenix, Maryland, pled guilty this week to wire fraud in connection with a eight month long mortgage fraud binge which defrauded lenders of $3.7 million and which left homeowners facing surprise foreclosures due to defaults on loans they thought were paid off.

Weis was president and a part-owner of Maple Leaf Title in Towson, Maryland. In February 2009, Weis began directing employees to withhold mortgage payoff checks in various transactions.  Then when the deals closed, Weis caused false settlement statements to be sent to the borrower's new lender which falsely represented that old loans were being paid off. 

This was not the case.  In at least 13 real estate closings conducted between February and September 2009, Weis failed to pay off mortgages and pocketed the proceeds of new loans instead.  In total, prosecutors documented that Weis had helped himself to $3.4 million out of Maple Leaf Title's escrow accounts.

In an effort to conceal the fraud scheme, Weis caused monthly mortgage payments to be made on the old loans that he had not paid off-- loans that the borrower was not making payments on in the belief that the bank had been paid off. No red flags were raised so long as lenders were receiving payments and borrowers were not receiving default notices. However the scheme began to fall apart when Weis failed to make payments on some loans where he had misappropriated the payoffs from escrow.  The borrowers on these loans received unexpected delinquency notices on these loans.  Some were threatened with foreclosure and were forced to hire attorneys to prevent being ejected from their homes.

The mess that remained left Maple Leaf Title's underwriter holding the bag for paying off $3.7 million in loans that Weis had failed to pay off.

Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein called the crime perplexing.  "[P]erpetrators [of this type of crime] should realize that they are almost certain to be caught sooner or later."

Weis had previously had a brush with Maryland's Insurance Commissioner's office in 2007, when, during an insurance department investigation of Maple Leaf Title for a consumer complaint, it was discovered that Weis's insurance license had been expired since September, 2003.  He paid a $500 fine to resolve the issue.

Weis faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison followed by five years of supervised release and a fine of $1 million when he is sentenced on February 4th, 2011.