MIAMI — Two men are facing charges in Miami federal court after agents said they stole the identities of the owners of a $10 million property in a ritzy South Florida neighborhood ― all in an underhanded attempt to use the land as collateral for a $6 million loan.
Investigators, however, said the would-be mortgage lender caught on before the two could pull off the scheme, which a legal analyst said could have cost the true owners of the Coral Gables property serious time and money.
Francisco Granati Poloni, 52, and Jackson Kelwin Ortuno, 42, are accused of impersonating a father and son who own the lot at 230 Arvida Parkway in the gated Gables Estates neighborhood, described by a local real estate website as “one of the most exclusive communities in the world.”
Their goal was to get a “cash-out refinance loan” on the vacant land, according to a criminal complaint authored on Wednesday by a special agent with the Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of the Inspector General.
The complaint states that the pair put their photos on foreign passports and driver’s licenses with the names and biographical information of the property owners and submitted them to the lender.
A third-party identification verification check on Feb. 26, in which Granati uploaded a scan of a Spanish passport with his face but the victim’s information, along with a separate self-portrait, failed due to “suspected tampering,” authorities said.
The next day, they said a fraudulent Venezuelan passport also failed, prompting the lender to request that Granati visit their Miami Beach office in person.
Investigators said on March 1, Granati went to the office with his “girlfriend,” a woman who translated from English to Spanish, for a face-to-face meeting. He claimed to be the property owner and produced the two phony passports, the complaint states.
Authorities said law enforcement was made aware of the transaction four days later and, after verifying the documents were fake, contacted the real property owners, who said none of it was done with their knowledge.
Authorities said Granati and Ortuno both showed up at the Miami Beach office on Tuesday “and signed numerous documents in the loan package,” more than 160 pages long, and “repeatedly falsely affirm(ed) their identity as the owners” of the property as they sought the $6 million.
Investigators said they “each presented fraudulent Spanish passports along with a matching fraudulent Spanish driver license.”
They were then taken into custody “without incident.” Investigators said they both “confessed to using the fraudulent identifications to obtain the loan and provided details on how they were recruited by co-conspirators to commit the fraud.”
Authorities said they “elaborated that they were given the fake identifications, instructed to memorize personally identifiable information of the identity theft victims and told when and where to show up to impersonate them with the promise of a share of the illicit funds if the fraud was successful.”
Legal analyst David Weinstein explained to Local 10 News that if the suspects had been successful, the two victims would have been at risk of foreclosure proceedings after unknowingly becoming responsible for a $6 million mortgage that likely would have gone unpaid for months.
He said it would have cost the victims time and significant legal expenses to save their property.
“It would have been a mess,” he said, noting that the lender did “what every lender should be doing” to stop fraud.
“They should be verifying,” Weinstein said.
Granati, listed in jail records as “at large,” and Ortuno, of Naples, now face federal charges of making a false statement to a financial institution and aggravated identity theft.
According to Cornell University’s law school, the two could spend more than three decades in prison if convicted.
Records show the two were originally booked into the Broward County Main Jail on Wednesday, but, as of Thursday afternoon, they were being held in the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami.
Online federal court records don’t list any upcoming hearings.
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