Homewood Man Convicted in Million-Dollar Bank Fraud

A Homewood man was convicted on federal bank fraud charges after scheming to obtain more than $1 million on luxury automobile loans.

Brian Hughes, 41, president of Hughes Corporate Consulting, was found guilty of four counts of bank fraud and one count of making false statements on a loan application, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office. He’s to be sentenced in June.

Hughes is one of four defendants found guilty in the $1.6 million fraud scheme, which victimized various credit union lenders, including Credit Union 1, Great Lakes Credit Union, Navy Federal Credit Union, Pentagon Federal Credit Union, and Sherwin-Williams Credit Union.

Hughes and another man, Precious W. House, 47, of Chicago, were convicted at trial in U.S. District Court on Thursday. House is the president of Rolling Auto, Inc. of Plymouth, Ind., and XPress Automotives of Chicago, two wholesale auto dealerships that purported to be selling many of the autos, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office. House was convicted of five counts of bank fraud.

In October, a Harvey man, Keith Foster, 46, pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements on a loan application. A Georgia woman, Crystal Williams, 31, pleaded guilty to bank fraud in September.

According to court records, between February and November 2013, Hughes and House recruited individuals seeking loans and agreed to find loans for them in exchange for a fee of 20 to 30 percent of the loan. The defendants obtained at least 36 automobile loans of the 51 total sought on behalf of the applicants, and the defendants fraudulently obtained approximately $1.12 million of the total $1.6 million for which they applied.

In order to obtain the loans, the defendants made, and caused the loan applicants to make, false representations in documents such as loan applications, vehicle purchase orders, and verifications of employment. The false statements concerned the applicants’ income, employment, credit history, intent to use the loan proceeds to purchase automobiles, and the existence of contracts obligating the borrowers to purchase vehicles from House and his companies, Rolling Auto and XPress Automotives. The purchase orders falsely represented that the loan applicants had contracts to purchase from House’s dealership various luxury autos made by BMW, Chevrolet, Jaguar, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Porsche.

If the individual applicants refused to cash checks obtained as part of the scheme, Hughes threatened them with civil lawsuits and criminal prosecutions. House then deposited the loan proceeds into bank accounts he controlled in Illinois, California, and Georgia.

Hughes and House could get up to 30 years in federal prison.

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