2 more charged in mortgage fraud scheme
Post-Tribune (IN)
January 29, 2011
January 29, 2011
A federal indictment charging a group of local people with running a mortgage fraud scheme that took in $650,000 continues to grow as two more people were added.
Richard Loveless and Jeffrey Youngheim, president and secretary of Gary-based Property Liquidators, respectively, were charged in a second superceding indictment filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court in Hammond with one count each of fraud and conspiring to defraud.
The men were added to a group of six other defendants that includes Sheila Chandler of Schererville, who is also charged in a similar federal indictment that includes Gary businessman Jerry Haymon and Gary city employee Jacquelyn Drago-Hunter . Chandler pleaded guilty in 1999 to embezzling $259,677 from the Lake County Economic Opportunity Council.
The indictment claims that the eight defendants worked together to find buyers for houses in Gary and Merrillville who paid inflated prices for the homes. The seller would receive just the actual prices of the home, while the defendants would get the rest of the money by placing liens on the homes for work they had supposedly done to renovate the houses.
The work was never done, however, the indictment says.
It also accuses several of the defendants with filling out false loan information for the buyers so that unidentified banks would lend them money for a mortgage.According to the indictment, Loveless and Youngheim sold several of the homes listed in the indictment. Both men were arrested Thursday, according to court records, and will be arraigned Feb. 7.
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