Two charged in Deschutes County real estate, mortgage fraud scheme

A Deschutes County grand jury has indicted two people on several charges in connection with significant mortgage and rental fraud schemes, District Attorney John Hummel said Wednesday.

Mark Franklin Broeg, 59, was arrested Tuesday in Lane County on seven felony counts including racketeering, mortgage fraud, and other theft-related charges, Hummel said in a news release.

A co-defendant in the case is Michelle Marie Anderson, 39, a licensed Realtor with Artisan Realty Group, LLC in Sisters. Anderson, was arrested Wednesday, and is charged with several felony counts of theft of services, attempted aggravated theft, forgery and negotiating a bad check.

A Deschutes County Jail officer said Anderson was booked into the jail around 6:40 p.m. and released about four hours later after posting 10 percent of her $25,000 bail.

The charges result from an investigation for several months involving the Deschutes County District Attorney’s office, the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services’ Finance and Corporate Securities Division and the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office.

Hummel said the investigation uncovered an ongoing mortgage fraud scheme, implemented by Broeg. According to state investigators, Broeg created a fictitious business, McCoy Capital, which he used in an attempt to obtain fraudulent loans and illegal commissions, while posing as a mortgage broker.

These illegal business activities included attempts to fraudulently purchase both residential and development properties in Deschutes County, valued in total at over $5 million, Hummel said.

Anderson is alleged to have obtained the assistance of Broeg in one transaction, in which she attempted to complete a fraudulent home purchase. In addition, she is alleged to have been involved in her own ongoing rental scam, defrauding landlords in Sisters of thousands of dollars last year.

Broeg was booked into the Lane County Jail Tuesday evening, facing felony fraud, forgery and racketeering charges. Hummel said Wednesday he did not yet know when Broeg would be transported to Bend to face the charges, and that Anderson has not yet been arrested.

“Real estate is one of the backbones of the central Oregon economy,” Hummel said in the statement.

“On behalf of our community’s thousands of honest and hardworking real estate professionals, tens of thousands of real estate investors and hundreds of thousands of homeowners and tenants, all of whom rely and depend on our real estate professionals to be ethical and law-abiding, your district attorney’s office will continue to root out fraud in the real estate industry and hold offenders accountable.”