FLORIDA FORECLOSURE AUCTION SCAM WARNING!

By Paige Levesque

In Mark Stopa Scams

December 15, 2022

8 min read

FLORIDA FORECLOSURE AUCTION SCAM WARNING! Head For The Hills If The Auction Notice Contains The Names Of Any Of These Companies Or Lawyers

Mark Stopa Adrienne Federico Money Heist Scam

If you are a real estate investor bidding on foreclosure auctions in Florida, you need to read our Florida Foreclosure Auction Scam Warning before you bid on any auctions. If you do want to bid, be sure to spend the money on a 30 yr title search to find all liens before you bid.

Potential investors should also make sure the stamp tax has been paid on the lien they are bidding on.

One way to see if a lien is legitimate is to see if it contains a doc stamp from the county on the top of the document. If it does not, it’s a SCAM! Also, if there is NO PROOF of debt in the court file. The foreclosure is a result of an “equitable lien” and most likely a Mark Stopa SCAM so DO NOT BID!

Disbarred Attorney Mark Stopa Runs The Florida Foreclosure Auction Scam

The scam is run by disbarred foreclosure defense lawyer Mark Stopa and his crime family wife Adrienne Federico. Stopa is infamous for MANIPULATING the court system and using underhanded dirty court tricks to win. In fact, the only way Stopa appears to have been successful as a foreclosure defense attorney is by manipulating the courts and conflating the issues to cause chaos in order to trick unwary judges into ruling for him.

The Florida Bar stripped Stopa of his law license for defrauding hundreds of his own law clients. One of Stopa’s favorite court tricks is the “equitable lien” scam.

This is where Stopa fabricates a completely phony debt and tricks a clueless county court judge into signing a foreclosure judgment to validate the fake debt.

Potential investors should take the time and spend the money to do a title search before bidding. This could save the investor from losing a five-figure deposit. Or worse, be a winning bidder where you are now responsible for a $500,000 first mortgage. All courtesy of Mark Stopa and Adrienne Federico crime family scheme.

Foreclosure Auction Scams Aren’t New But Stopa Has Taken It To The Next Level!

Foreclosure auction scams are not new in Florida. However, Stopa has taken the scheme to whole new level. The scam is currently under investigation by the organized crime divisions of the FDLE and the FBI. Law enforcement is absolutely overwhelmed investigating the hundreds of complaints from victims in dozens of counties over the past 5 years.

Stopa & Federico allegedly got the idea for their scam after reading a blog post about equity skimming scams. The article appeared on the mortgage fraud investigation website MFI-Miami in 2017. The article exposed how attorney Roy Skelton was busted performing the same equity skimming scams as Stopa. Stopa learned about it from the MFI-Miami website and copied what Skelton did and took it to the next level. Stopa seems to have skimmed over the part where Skelton got caught.

Former paralegals say Stopa regularly read the MFI Miami blog site to learn how to do foreclosure defense. He called former associates after reading the Skelton article acting giddy like a 14 year old girl. He boasted about how much money he could make scamming inexperienced and “stupid” amateur investors.

The Mechanics Of The Massive Florida Foreclosure Auction Scam

Here is how the scam works. Stopa would deceive his own law clients and advise them to sign over the deed to their home to a mystery “investor.” However, he neglected to disclose to his clients that the investor was actually a shell company owned by him and his wife Adrienne Federico.

He would then rent out his own client’s former home and pocket the rental funds. Meanwhile, he would mislead the court into believing he was still representing the former property owner in order to defraud lenders out of attorney fees when he won dismissals. This was yet another scheme to defraud. Stopa would not be entitled to attorney fees once his clients deeded their home to him. The Florida Bar frowns on this type of unethical conduct. The state of Florida also considers this equity skimming. Equity skimming is also illegal in Florida. It is also illegal under Federal law if nationally chartered banks are the ones foreclosing.

The Tampa Bay Times wrote about Mark Stopa’s crimes back in 2018.

Stopa would use his knowledge of the law and court rules to obstruct lenders. He would also use this knowledge to delay the foreclosure for several years. This way, he could continue to pocket rent on the property while defrauding Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and FHA. Stopa skimmed millions of dollars in ill-gotten rents from his former clients over the last decade. In one case, the Stopa and Federico crime family pocketed nearly $50,000 from an unsuspecting retired couple from Ohio.

The couple settled into the Manatee County property rented to them by one of Stopa’s LLCs. Soon afterwards, the couple were served with eviction papers from a lender. The lender acquired ownership after successfully foreclosing on the property.

It turns out the disbarred attorney didn’t disclose to the Ohio couple that the property was in foreclosure when he rented them the property and took a $15,000 rental deposit.

The Florida Foreclosure Auction Scam Targeted Unsuspecting And Inexperienced Auction Bidders

mark stopa adrienne federico crime family RICO

When Stopa began losing the properties he scammed from his former clients in foreclosure, he knew the days were numbered on his rental scams.

So, he copied Roy Skelton and switched gears to a different type of equity skimming scam. He created 18 new alter ego LLC entities in New Mexico and Florida.

When the senior mortgage lender was getting close to foreclosure, Stopa would fabricate a phony “equitable lien” debt and sue himself for $25-$30,000. He picked a relatively small dollar amount to file the case in county court where he could trick clueless (Stopa’s own words) county court judges into signing a foreclosure judgment.

Stopa would engage two of the corrupt crime family attorneys from the list below. Together they would collude together in a scheme to defraud the court by filing the bogus complaint. The reason both sides quickly stipulate to a foreclosure judgment is they are desperate to get their case to foreclosure sale before the senior lender forecloses and Stopa loses the home.

Fooling Potential Investors

Because the underlying mortgage is in the name of his former client from several years earlier, most inexperienced auction bidders fail to find the senior mortgage lien. They falsely believe the home is free & clear and the only lien on the property is the bogus Stopa-Federico crime family judgment.

The first step is to get a judge to sign the judgment. Once that happens, the Stopa crime family would advertise the auction on nearly a dozen websites across the United States. They would also usually start the bidding at $25,000 to $30,000. Naturally, amateur and inexperienced investors think this a great deal. As a result, competing bids drive up the sale price into the six-figure range. Florida law allows the property owner to collect the winning bid. In this case, it is Mark Stopa and Adrienne Federico.

If the winning bidder backs out of the deal which has happened in several of these cases, Stopa and Federico get to pocket the forfeited deposit. If the winning bidder overbids the judgment by tens of thousands of dollars – it creates a surplus which is collected by Mark Stopa and Adrienne Federico as the owner-defendants of the scam.

Unbelievable isn’t it? What a scam. Why rob a bank when you can just manipulate and deceive the county clerk and clueless judges to do the stealing for you.

Stopa Scam