Where are all the big Bay State mortgage fraud cases?

It was absolutely ludicrous how easy it was for even third-rate scam artists to make money during the real estate boom.

Buy a couple run-down triple deckers in Dorchester, do a quick paint job and then recruit a few dopes to act as straw buyers. With a little help from a crooked mortgage broker, make up some jobs and income, find a more than willing sucker among the herd of subprime mortgage companies eager to keep loans flowing, and “sell’’ all three units, say, for $350,000 each.

Walk away with more than $1 million in your pocket, minus maybe a couple hundred grand for buying the property.

Now, with mortgage fraud cases popping all over the country, you have to ask where are all the high-profile Bay State cases?

We certainly had our share of fraud, with foreclosures, phony sales and straw buyers galore in Boston’s lower-income neighborhoods and in hard-hit cities like Springfield, Worcester, Lawrence, and Brockton.

Having covered real estate in the Boston area for several years, I can tell you such phony deals were a dime a dozen and not so hard to spot.

But, until the last year or two, most local and state officials were not that interested.
That will hopefully change now that the Obama Administration has begun pushing the mortgage fraud issue and vowing a crackdown.

Anyway, it’s certainly interesting what state and federal investigators are turning up in other part of the country.

For starters, there is a $50 million mortgage fraud scheme tied to a sex fetish studio on Manhattan. The owners of an S&M establishment recruited clients to act as straw buyers on phony sales, prosecutors contend.

In San Diego, authorities have just busted up a $100 million fraud ring involving 220 properties led by a gang member.

And in New Jersey, a real estate developer just plead guilty to bilking $80 million from lenders and hapless investors in a spree of phony home sales and deals that stretched across dozens of states.

Don’t think for a minute this stuff wasn’t happening here in the Boston area as well.