Asifo gets 57 months for mortgage fraud

A Woodbridge man was sentenced to serve more than four years in federal prison Friday for running a mortgage fraud scheme.

A jury in August convicted Godwin Asifo, 55, of two counts of mail fraud and one count of wire fraud for the scheme that resulted in the foreclosure of three homes, including one in Woodbridge and one in Haymarket.

Friday a judge sentenced Asifo to serve four years and nine months in prison and to pay $546,685.20 in restitution.

According to an affidavit on file at U.S. District Court in Alexandria, between May and June of 2006, Asifo arranged the sales of a house in the 3900 block of Tecumseh Court in Woodbridge, one in the 5700 block of Caribbean Drive in Haymarket and one in the 42400 block of Rockrose Square in Ashburn to "straw buyers."

Asifo told the buyers, who did not plan to live in the houses, that they did not have to put their own money down to purchase the houses and that the mortgage payments would be made for them, according to the affidavit.

Asifo recruited the buyers by promising that he would sell the houses within six months and share the profits with them, the documents state.

He also told the buyers that purchasing the houses would help them get loans to buy their own houses later.

Asifo also helped the buyers get loans to purchase the houses by inflating the income listed on their loan applications, falsifying their employment records and giving them thousands of dollars to inflate their bank accounts, prosecutors said.

The three houses, which were purchased for between $335,000 and $765,000, ultimately did not sell for profit and the three buyers all eventually defaulted on their loans, causing the houses to go into foreclosure and resulting in "substantial losses" to the lenders, prosecutors said.

In court documents, prosecutors said Asifo showed no remorse for the scheme and did nothing to help the straw buyers once they began to default on the loans.

"He not only has shown no remorse regarding his fraud against the lenders, but also has shown no remorse for luring the straw buyers, all hard-working relatively recent immigrants, into his scheme," prosecutors wrote.

In a letter to the court, Asifo asked for leniency and said he did not know what he was doing when he got involved in the scheme.

"I have tried to analyze this over and over each day and I can honestly say that I regretfully entered into a territory I was not familiar with," Asifo wrote. "Alas, sometimes in life we engage in a seemingly harmless venture in good faith but with a genuine but mistaken belief that we are doing the right thing."

Staff writer Amanda Stewart can be reached at 703-878-8014.