“You’re going to have a group of people just look at this, and then look at x and y and z, and no one’s going to ever put it all together. Some stuff’s going to sneak through, and we’re going to have to make sure that there is human intervention somewhere in there.”
For brokers who are still in a position to review loans before they are finalized, one area where Seguin believes people can spot fraud is the pattern loan.
“My advice would be to really just look for patterns that don’t make sense,” he said. “A lot of brokers have referral sources, whether they’re realtors or something else. You might notice that there’s a vast majority of those referral sources. Where they’re all self-employed borrowers, or they all come in from the same tax preparer. Things that might seem too good to be true that fit in a pattern. I think that’s where you get really, really burned big time.”
Of course, Seguin notes that if a tax preparer is one of your referral sources, that wouldn’t be a pattern you could use. But even then, if a group of borrowers from the same tax preparer always seems to earn the right amount of money to qualify, that might be a red flag.
“Analyze those lead sources to figure out what the commonalities are,” Seguin said. “If your lead source is a tax preparer, okay, it makes sense that they’re all going to be from that tax preparer. But if not, then maybe it doesn’t make sense. If all the borrowers come from this one tax preparer, and they all make the perfect amount of income to qualify, that just seems too good to be true. That’s when that antenna should go up for you.”
