Disbarred Illinois lawyer gets 57 months in mortgage-rescue fraud case
A disbarred Illinois lawyer was sentenced Wednesday to 57 months in federal prison for her role in a Chicago-area mortgage-rescue fraud and ordered to pay $239,550.48 in restitution.
Avalon Betts-Gaston, now 47, was convicted by a jury last year of two counts of wire fraud. Betts-Gaston had formed a suburban Chicago company with a licensed real estate loan officer, Dimona or Dmona Ross, that was dissolved in 2008. Its purported purpose, while still in business, was to help distressed homeowners refinance to prevent foreclosure, federal prosecutors said, but in fact the two worked together to perpetrate a fraud on both homeowners and lenders.
With Betts-Gaston handling legal aspects and Ross arranging loans, the women sold four homes to straw buyers rather than refinancing them, according to the Naperville Sun (reg. req.) and the Chicago Sun-Times (sub. req.).
Meanwhile, by providing “materially false information” on loan documents, mortgages for four Cook County properties worth over $725,000 were arranged, explains a news release by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Northern District of Illinois.
The straw buyers and Betts-Gaston and Ross were paid fees, plus the two women obtained all of the equity from the homes after the new mortgages paid off existing loans, according to the release.
“This case demonstrates a sophisticated scheme to take advantage of the trust that mortgage lenders placed in the loan applications they received, and the trust that the homeowners placed in her,” said assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Chahn Lee of Betts-Gaston in a sentencing memorandum. “The homeowners believed that she was there to help them, and instead she put their homes and equity at risk.”
Betts-Gatson was disbarred in 2012.
Ross previously pleaded guilty to one wire-fraud count and is scheduled to be sentenced in May.
The news articles don’t include any comment from the defendants or their legal counsel.
