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Jacqueline Graham, who operated Terra Foundation in Valhalla, was sentenced to 132 months in prison in connection with a $38 million fraudulent mortgage debt elimination scheme, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman announced. Graham was convicted in June last year following a two-week trial.
Berman said that from at least 2011 through 2012, Graham partnered with Bruce Lewis and John Ruzza in operating Terra Foundation, which claimed to be a business that would investigate and eliminate mortgage loans in exchange for fees, soliciting clients who were having difficulties making their mortgage payments.
However, Terra engaged in a wide-ranging scheme to defraud clients, county clerks’ offices, and banks, Berman said.
The scheme, which was birthed by Graham and Lewis, involved the company performing “audits” of clients’ mortgages, sending pseudo-legal paperwork to the banks and lenders holding the mortgages, filing the alleged mortgage discharges with county clerks’ offices.
According to Berman, as a result, anyone doing a title search for one of Terra’s clients would see that the client’s mortgage had been satisfied.
The mortgages had not, however, been discharged, and the mortgages were eventually reinstated after the clients paid their fees.
In total, Graham and her co-conspirators filed more than 60 fraudulent discharges in Westchester and Putnam counties and Connecticut. In total, the fraudulent discharges claimed to discharge mortgages with a total loan principal of nearly $38 million.
“Jacqueline Graham brazenly defrauded vulnerable homeowners during the housing crisis by falsely promising that, for substantial fees, she could make millions of dollars of their mortgage debt disappear,” Berman said. “In reality, she pilfered her victims’ money, leaving them far worse off, and some ended up losing their homes. Now Graham will spend 11 years in federal prison for preying upon her many victims.”
Graham, 54, formerly of Antioch, California, and Levittown, Pennsylvania, was also sentenced to five years of supervised release and ordered to pay restitution to her victims in the amount of $694,450 and she will forfeit $138,941.86.
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