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Two men were sentenced in federal court last week for what prosecutors called a “wide-ranging” mortgage fraud scheme involving 24 loans on “numerous” multifamily properties in Hartford.

Brooklyn, New York resident Jacob Deutsch, 58, will spend just over five years in prison followed by four years of supervised release and a $10,000 fine. Monsey, New York resident Aron Deutsch, 63, will spend five years on probation and pay a $1 million fine.

An announcement from the office of Vanessa Roberts Avery, United States attorney for Connecticut, said the two men worked for B H Property Management LLC, where Jacob ran day-to-day operations. Between September 2016 and May 2021, the two defrauded “several” financial institutions including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development by providing them with false information overstating the value of multifamily housing properties managed by the company in connection with loans secured by those properties.

Jacob Deutsch would provide false rent rolls and falsified leases to lenders and their appraisers, Avery’s office said. The faked documents would either overstate the number of renters by listing fictitious renters or others not actually living there, or inflate the amount of rent paid by occupants. He would stage unoccupied apartments with furniture and make his employees tell inspectors they lived in the units.

In one example detailed by Avery’s office, Jacob Deutsch convinced CBRE Capital Markets in June 2018 that 16 Evergreen Ave., an apartment near Hartford’s historic Mark Twain House, was 100 percent occupied when, in fact, not a single tenant lived there. He used a faked rent roll and income and expense summary and later e-mailed CBRE pictures of money orders and checks purporting to reflect rent payments from fake tenants on the falsified rent rolls for the building when the money orders and checks had actually been purchased by Aron Deutsch or BHPM employees at Aron Deutsch’s direction.

The net effect: The lenders made loans on properties they would otherwise never have financed and made loans larger than they would have normally authorized on other properties. The fraud extended to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and HUD when the former two bought the loans and HUD insured them. The scheme cost lenders around $50 million, prosecutors said.

In addition, Avery’s office said, after he was arrested Jacob Deutsch defrauded another lender to secure an $11 million loan. He was also convicted of wire fraud in New York State and sentenced to three months in prison for the crime last year.

Both Jacob and Aron Deutsch pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud affecting a financial institution in the summer of 2022.