If you are considering perpetrating a white-collar crime, you might want to stick to wire or mail fraud and steer clear of mortgage fraud- the FBI is shifting its priorities:
June 12 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, confronting a surge in mortgage fraud, has ordered more than two dozen of its field offices to stop probing some financial crimes so agents can focus on the subprime crisis.
Kenneth Kaiser, chief of the bureau’s criminal investigative division, issued the directive late last week on a video conference call with the heads of 26 offices in areas where mortgage crime is rampant, said Bill Carter, an FBI spokesman in Washington.
Carter said the shift was made after an analysis of how agents are spending their time. The FBI traditionally has moved investigators to address urgent needs, he said. About 150 agents were working on more than 1,300 mortgage cases before the change.
The problem is, there aren’t enough agents to go around:
“It comes as no surprise that law enforcement is spread too thin to cover all the bases,” Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat and member of the Judiciary Committee, which oversees the FBI, said in an e-mailed statement. “Over the past several years, the administration has reassigned as many as 2,400 FBI agents from fighting crime to combating terrorism without replacing them.”
The 26 field offices were told to temporarily suspend opening new cases dealing with price fixing, mass marketing, wire fraud, mail fraud and environmental crimes, Carter said. Current cases aren’t being dropped, he said. The FBI has 56 field offices and about 12,000 agents.
Carter said the bureau is “not walking away” from pending investigations. “We’re just saying, `Don’t open any new cases,”’ he said.
The affected FBI offices are in states including Florida, Georgia, California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, New York, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Minnesota, he said. All are considered mortgage fraud “hot spots,” he said.
Even at that, the FBI isn’t going to make a dent in wide world of mortgage fraud:
