Man Faces Prison for Bilking 2 Loan Companies

A Los Angeles man used credit checks, a chain of post office boxes and some quick research on vacant lots in San Clemente and elsewhere to bilk two home loan companies out of $613,000, a federal prosecutor said Monday.

Robert Fine Jr., 33, pleaded guilty last week in U.S. District Court to fraud and using phony names in connection with the scam. He faces up to 10 years in prison and $500,000 in fines at a scheduled sentencing April 16, Assistant U.S. Atty. Stephen A. Mansfield said.

“It’s a simple and effective fraud that was not really detected (until) a fortuitous conversation by two loan officers,” Mansfield said.

Fine scouted for vacant, unencumbered properties in public real estate records, Mansfield said. He then used the information he found to obtain credit reports on their owners.

With the credit reports, he applied for loans using the owners’ identities and listing private post office box services in Northern California as the applicants’ addresses. The loans were supposedly intended to fund a breakthrough in AIDS research.

Under this method, Fine filed four fraudulent loan applications using the names of three landowners. Two of the parcels that the applications listed for purposes of collateral were in San Clemente and another was in Marina del Rey.

One of the San Clemente parcels is owned by Pasadena florist Jacob Maarse, who said Monday that the experience of being the intended victim of the fraud was “very unpleasant.”

Imperial Home Loans and Hanover Funding Assn., both of Encino, both granted the loan requests. They sent checks to the private mail box services listed in the applications, which were then forwarded to Fine.

The scam might have continued had it not been for casual chat one day between loan officers of the two companies. They got to talking about the loans they had funded recently, discovering that they both had clients who sought funding for AIDS cures, Mansfield said.

Checking further, they discovered that both of these customers listed the same telephone number. When they called, they were greeted by the same answering machine with the recorded voice of the man who had previously dealt with each of them over the phone.

Alerted by the loan officers, postal inspectors started tracking the post office box trail. They staked out a Los Angeles post office where Fine was having his mail sent from the Northern California boxes.

When Fine showed up and grabbed a $181,000 loan check from Hanover Funding, a postal inspector arrested him.

A federal grand jury indicted Fine last November.

Under a plea bargain arrangement, all but two of the original 14 counts against Fine were dropped in return for his guilty plea, Mansfield said.