A pair of former financial services specialists in Virginia were sentenced for conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud impacting financial institutions relating to their unlawful use of client information to obtain loans.
According to court documents, Roberta Leigh Dawson, aka Bird, was a licensed loan officer with a local mortgage brokerage. Edward Fitzgerald purported to be a financial advisor with an expertise in real estate transactions and investments.
Fitzgerald’s clients provided him with access to their money, financial information, and means of identification. Fitzgerald passed his clients’ information to Dawson to obtain fraudulent real estate loans.
In some cases, Fitzgerald and Dawson sold their victims’ homes without their knowledge, including to straw buyers. They would then strip out the equity and use it to pay their own expenses, and they also used their victims’ personal information without their knowledge to obtain loans in their names and submitted to financial institutions loan applications that were riddled with misstatements.
Dawson withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars of victim cash from accounts she controlled after fraudulently diverting the funds into those accounts. He routinely paid Fitzgerald’s credit card, which he used for extravagant travel, luxury items, and daily expenses, with more than $1 million in funds obtained from the fraud scheme.
Both Dawson and Fitzgerald pled guilty last September. Dawson was sentenced to two years and six months in prison while Fitzgerald was sentenced five years in prison.
