In May 2026, Mordichai Weiss, a 29-year-old real estate investor, stood in a Trenton federal courtroom and pleaded guilty to obtaining roughly $230 million in multifamily and commercial mortgage loans with altered bank records and fake settlement statements. The scheme ran fourteen months. Lenders, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, lost about $94 million.
He wasn't an outlier. He was a chapter.
Over the past three years, federal prosecutors have worked through a wave of commercial mortgage fraud that most people in lending have followed case by case. Williamsburg of Cincinnati, an apartment complex purchased for $70 million and papered at nearly $96 million in a same-day second closing, which turned into a $74 million agency-backed loan for Moshe Silber and Fredrick Schulman of Rhodium Capital Advisors. Boruch Drillman's $165 million guilty plea, which ended with Fannie Mae refusing to accept loans closed by two title companies. In its 2024 annual report, Fannie set aside $752 million against multifamily credit losses, and named fraud or suspected fraud as one of the reasons.
Almost every one of these loans made it through underwriting. Appraisal, title, financials, rent roll. Nothing was missing from the file, and almost none of it was true.
Underwriting is built to verify documents, and these schemes were built to produce convincing documents. A falsified purchase contract defeats a review of the purchase contract. A doctored bank statement defeats a review of the bank statement. When the paper itself is the lie, checking the paper harder doesn't help.
What the paper can't fake is history. So we ran the history on one of these sponsor networks the way we would run a live file, using only records that existed before the loans closed.
Aron Puretz has since pleaded guilty and been sentenced to five years in federal prison. At the time, he was an owner behind Troy Technology Park, a $45 million Michigan loan that closed in September 2020, supported by a fraudulent letter of intent and a double closing that papered a $42.7 million purchase as $70 million.
Everything below was already sitting in state court files more than eighteen months before that wire went out. He had appeared as a named party in nineteen civil matters.
Four of those were foreclosure judgments. One was a contempt action brought by the City of New York after he ignored a subpoena tied to $284,300 in unpaid judgments, served at his own front door. At least four more were suits from lenders and investors, some of them filed while, per his own guilty plea, the schemes were already running. Two were county health department actions that ended in judgments.
The court file is only part of it. The same family already owned the Alms and other low-income complexes in Cincinnati, and that record was not quiet either. The city sued over more than 1,800 health and safety violations across five complexes. A county judge declared the properties a nuisance, then ordered them into receivership. It ran on local news for years. None of this was buried in a database. It was on television.
None of it required a subpoena. It required someone to look at the people instead of the paperwork.
We traced the subject and confirmed that each docket actually belonged to him, rather than trusting the name on the filing. That step is not optional, and this file is why. Two hits came back on a different individual who shares a family name with the subject, and they came out of the findings. A name match tells you a record exists. It does not tell you whose it is.
There's a reason nobody looked. The named borrower on a deal like this is usually a brand-new LLC, formed for the purchase, with no history to find. Sometimes the person signing is young and litigation-free on paper, while the record sits with the family members, trusts, and affiliated entities standing behind the deal.
Here the trail ran three generations deep. Puretz's father, a real estate developer, sat beside him as a co-defendant in suit after suit. His son, Eli Puretz, in his mid-twenties and clean on paper, was an owner of record on the Troy loan, and pleaded guilty in the same investigation as a defendant in the Williamsburg case.
Screen the entity and you screen a shell. Screen only the signer and you screen the front. The findings live one layer out, in the network.
The practical takeaways, from the schemes themselves and from how the agencies responded:
None of this is exotic. It's the ordinary discipline of confirming that the people behind a deal are who the file says they are, done consistently, at a depth that matches the size of the deal.
BusinessScreen is a licensed investigative firm. We run person-level and entity-level due diligence for commercial lenders: civil litigation, judgments, liens, foreclosures, associated business risk, adverse media, verified at the source by licensed investigators rather than left as raw database output. Most subjects come back clean, and a clean report on a fast timeline is the goal. The few that don't are the whole point of screening. Not every deal needs the depth this one would have called for, and where each level fits is something we've written about in right-sizing diligence and when to escalate a screen.
If you'd like to see what this looks like on a real file, reach out and we'll run the sponsors on a deal you've already closed, then walk you through what the record showed against what you knew at the time.
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