U.S. District Attorney Jeffrey Sloman has unveiled a massive, multi-agency bust of 41 people after authorities broke up a mortgage fraud ring in South Florida. The 41 defendants include bankers, appraisers, mortgage brokers, title agents, real estate agents, and straw buyers. They span six separate cases and are alleged to have committed over $40 million in fraud.

The joint federal and state task force was the result of hard work by the U.S. Department of Justice, Secret Service, U.S. Postal Service (USPS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and other agencies.

In a complicated case of mortgage fraud, identity theft and deception, the Justice Department details how dozens of people participated in years of crimes: "the indictment describes three methods used by the defendants to execute their scheme."

"First, the defendants created and submitted to the lending institutions false duplicate HUD-Settlement Statement Forms, which grossly inflated the true purchase price of the properties. At other times, the defendants adopted a shotgun approach to mortgage fraud, through which they obtained near-simultaneous loans for the same piece of property from multiple lenders. Finally, the defendants concocted entirely false real estate sales by stealing the identities of unwitting home owners, forging the sales documents in their names, and using complicit straw purchasers to obtain mortgages, all without the real property owners' knowledge or consent," the Justice Department explained.