Stolen Homes: Mortgage Relief Scams
The Perfect Scam
AARP
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 January 2020
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
During the housing market crash, homeowners across the United States found themselves drowning in mortgage payments that they could not afford to make. Scammers like Jonathan Herbert took advantage of this crisis to steal money from unsuspecting homeowners. Herbert created Federal Mortgage Marketplace, a company that claimed to be government affiliated and able to help homeowners reduce their mortgage payments. Herbert preyed on homeowners whose desperation to avoid foreclosure made them particularly susceptible to the scam. Instead of providing any form of assistance as he promised, Herbert stole his clients' mortgage payments, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars lost, with some victims even losing their homes.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week on AARP is the Perfect Scam. |
| 0:05.0 | He's just somebody that through the years has been involved in some type of criminal activity |
| 0:11.0 | and found this as an easy way to make some quick money a lot of money and to |
| 0:17.8 | deceive as many people as possible. Welcome back to AARP's The Perfect Scam. I'm Julie Gets and with me today is my co-host Frank Abagnale. Frank, it's good to see you. |
| 0:29.6 | It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. |
| 0:31.6 | Frank, you're one of the busiest people that I know. |
| 0:34.0 | You're the AARP ambassador and fraud expert traveling around the country speaking to |
| 0:39.2 | communities on fraud prevention. You're writing books including the new one with AARP |
| 0:44.6 | scammy if you can, which folks if you haven't gotten your copy yet you'll |
| 0:47.5 | definitely want to. It really teaches you how to stop scammers in their |
| 0:51.0 | tracks. I really enjoyed reading it. And also all your work with the |
| 0:54.4 | FBI. Frank, we're curious, what are you teaching at the FBI Academy these days? |
| 0:59.6 | First let me go back 40 years ago when I talked about embezzlement, check forgery, counterfeiting. |
| 1:05.8 | Today the last 20 years is all about cybercrime and identity theft, things that didn't exist |
| 1:10.7 | 40 years ago when I started teaching there. |
| 1:14.0 | And I teach, new agents who come into the academy. |
| 1:17.4 | I also teach a program for our national academy. |
| 1:20.8 | That's where we bring law enforcement agencies from all over the world, from |
| 1:23.9 | Hong Kong, from India that come and they go through an 11 week course and of course |
| 1:29.3 | the Cecil Academy where we bring in chief information security officers from Fortune |
| 1:33.8 | 100 500 companies. They spend a week at the Academy. I teach a part of that that |
| 1:38.6 | deals with cybercrime. I also spend a lot of my time out and we have 56 field offices in the United States |
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