Matthew Cox: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. So I had started a mortgage company. I had maybe a dozen guys working for me, and there was fraud. I would say it wasn’t all fraud, but whatever, 60, 70% of it was fraud that was going in there. And from the outside of that business, it looked very legitimate. We were an FHA approved lender. We were a VA approved lender. We did conventional, probably signed up with 40 or 50 subprime lenders. But there was a considerable amount of fraud. It became a game, right? I started getting just more and more creative. Like I said, every time I would get away with something you become emboldened by it. It’s like, “Nice.” ” Hey, the underwriter’s looking for this and looking for this.” And you sit there and go, “Man. What am I going to do? You know what we could do? We could create our own bank.” “What?” “Yeah. Here’s we’re going to do. We’re going to go on…” How do they know if this bank exists? These people are in California, they’re in New York. They don’t know. “So what we’re going to do is we’re going to go online,” and keep mind, this is 2000, 2001. The internet’s in its infancy still, right? I remember GoDaddy, I think had just come up with a site where you could build your own website. How cool is that? So I go online with a buddy of mine, and we create something called the Bank of Ybor. We cut and pasted things that we liked from other banks. We got a 1-800 number you could call, or a 186 number, whatever it was, and you could call it, and it would go to a voicemail. So we set up this bank, and then I ended up making bank statements, which by this point, I already had been making bank statements to prove someone has their down payment. Because a lot of times people, they have good enough credit to borrow 95% or 90%, but they don’t have their down payment. So we’d raise the purchase price high enough to cover their five or 10% down payment. We would bring their down payment for them, or we’d have the owner of the house bring the down payment for them. Then we would have a check cut out of the clothing statement to a construction company that I owned, and we get our money back. So they get into the house for 100% financing or 110%. Some of them turned into one 130. We want to pay off their car, give them an incentive to sign. They still don’t have the money to buy it. So we are doing all kinds of insane things. Well, at some point, remember Gretchen Zayas, my old manager? Yeah, the original.…

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