Three men, including one from Irvine who helped operate a $5.7 million Orange County-based “foreclosure rescue scam,” were convicted of fraud in Sacramento Monday. Another of the three and his brother of Huntington Beach were convicted in the same court in June for a $15 million foreclosure scheme.
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Jeremy Michael “Mike” Head and Brother Guilty of Running $15 Million Foreclosure Scam
The leader of this ratty pack was 36-year-old Charles Head, formerly of LA, who was convicted Monday alongside Domonic McCarns, 39, of Irvine, and Benjamin Budoff, 46, of Colorado Springs, Colo. Through Head Financial Services and Creative Loans, they extracted more than $5.7 million in equity from victims' homes, many in California, from March 2005 to June 2006.
Head was convicted of three counts of mail fraud, while he, McCarns and Budoff were guilty of three counts of conspiracy to commit mail fraud.
Head and his 33-year-old brother, Jeremy Michael “Mike” Head, of Huntington Beach, were found guilty of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and two and four counts respectively of mail fraud in Sacramento in June.
Both scams were similar: Head Financial solicited people facing foreclosure with promises to save their homes and repair their credit. But then the scammers enlisted family and friends to serve as straw buyers who, unbeknownst to the relief seekers, wound up acquiring the titles to the houses.
All the equity was then squeezed out of the homes, which along with the rent the original mortgage holders paid the crooks was split with the straw buyers. Those who had turned to Head Financial for help were left in the end with no equity, no homes and damaged credit.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.