In a case that lays bare the machinations of mortgage fraud, 53-year-old Aron Puretz from New Jersey entered a guilty plea to charges of conspiring to defraud financial institutions of more than $54.7 million worth of loans. Court documents, as reported by ClickOnDetroit, illustrate a deliberate scheme carried out from 2016 through 2022. This fraudulent activity was related to the acquisition of multifamily and commercial properties across various states, including Michigan.

The operation included the use of counterfeit financial documents such as purchase contracts showing bloated prices and falsified financial statements. Puretz, associated with the real estate investment firm Apex Equity Group, was implicated in the acquisition and manipulation of prices of a handful of properties. Among them were Maple Lawn in Eureka, Illinois, Big Country Chateau in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Troy Technology Park in Troy, Michigan. He presented duplicitous purchase contracts for vastly inflated sums to lenders and Freddie Mac—a ploy that took place at dual closings facilitated by a settlement company in Lakewood, New Jersey.

Moreover, Puretz and his cohorts set up an entity named JPC Charities, cloaking their operations under tax-exempt status, and misled Eureka, Illinois, officials to obtain a property tax exemption, as stated by the U.S. Department of Justice. The complex web of deceit also involved concealing Puretz's involvement from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and other regulatory bodies.

Puretz's guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud has set a sentencing date for Oct. 30, where he faces the possibility of a maximum five-year imprisonment. The sentencing judge is expected to consider the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines among other statutory factors to determine the final sentence. The investigation into this expansive fraud case was a collaborative effort between the Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of Inspector General (FHFA-OIG) and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s (USPIS) Criminal Investigations Group.