How to prevent flipping fraud
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STAFF PHOTO / MIKE LANG. The Sarasota County Terrace Building at 101 S. Washington Blvd., includes offices of Property Appraiser, Supervisor of Elections and Tax Collector.
Flipping fraud was not invented during this decade's real estate boom. It helped burst Florida's real estate bubble during the 1920s and played a key role in the nation's savings and loan crisis in the 1980s.
But widespread flipping fraud does not have to happen again with the next real estate boom.
Though people determined to commit fraud will always look for weakness in the system, experts say there are ways to make mortgage fraud more difficult.
Some changes have already been adopted or are in the works. In 2007, Florida lawmakers specifically made mortgage fraud a crime for the first time in the state. Before that, such crimes had to be prosecuted federally or under the state's more generic fraud statutes.
