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A Melbourne mortgage broker has been jailed after exploiting the low-doc loan system to submit $9.4 million of fraudulent loans.
Cue Thi Huynh was last week sentenced by the Supreme Court of Victoria to four years in prison with a two-year non-parole period. Her family home may also be confiscated by the court.
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Ms Huynh faced a maximum sentence of 20 years after pleading guilty to 27 counts of obtaining financial advantage by deception.
Her firm, St Andrews Mortgage Solutions, was founded in 2006 and submitted the fraudulent loans between 2007 and 2013. The business closed following the police investigation.
According to Justice John Dixon, Ms Huynh pocketed $56,000 in commissions from the fraudulent loans – $41,000 up front and $15,000 in trail.
“With each application, if the borrower had disclosed his or her true financial position, or if you had disclosed the borrower’s financial position as you understood it, the loans would never have been granted,” Justice Dixon said.
“You told the police that the reason for your offending was that in the market that you were in, your clients told you that if you didn’t do it, they would go to other brokers.”
The fraudulent loans were backed by false payslips and false income statements, according to Justice Dixon.
Ms Huynh paid other business owners between $300 and $500 to verify false payslips.
She also charged clients between $200 and $2,000 to prepare false income statements for them. Justice Dixon estimated that she earned another $10,000 from these cash payments.
The loan applications and supporting documents were submitted electronically.
“These were low-doc loans and the lenders did not see the paperwork in its original form,” Justice Dixon said.
“Your method took advantage of the low-documentation regime, particularly the fact that your falsified payslips would not be examined in their original form. The lender was limited to the scanned document sent through electronically.”
The lenders have not suffered any financial losses from the borrowers and have not called up their fraudulent loans, according to Justice Dixon.
“Three properties were sold, apparently without loss to the lender, because the borrowers defaulted. The remaining loans are still being serviced and the current balance of all outstanding loans has reduced through those repayments,” the judge said.
