Woman Gets 5 Years After Twin Cities House-Flipping Fraud Schemes

MINNEAPOLIS – A Twin Cities house-flipper was sentenced to 58 months in prison and must pay $1,661,407.50 in restitution, U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger announced Friday.

Following her prison sentence, Suzanne Griffiths, 46, will be under supervised release for two years.

In June, Griffiths pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering.

From 2018 through December 2020, Griffiths worked to defraud people by soliciting investments in her Minnesota-based house-flipping businesses, according to authorities.

Griffiths was active in the house-flipping community and often attended real estate investment seminars, investigators said.

Griffiths networked at the seminars and pitched her own house-flipping businesses to people.

Those businesses, according to authorities, were:

• Level 5 Properties, LLC
• 45 North Investment Properties, LLC
• Our Town Properties

Griffiths frequently contacted seminar attendees and promised investors various manners of repayment, investigators said. She also misrepresented the status of real estate projects, failed to take promised action, falsified documents, and misappropriated investments for her own use, according to authorities.

In November 2018, Griffiths solicited a $100,000 investment from an investor to finance the renovation of a property, investigators said. She promised the investor that they would hold the second position on the mortgage and lied about the mortgage documents being filed with the appropriate county, according to authorities.

Griffiths never actually filed the documents and the investor lost their entire investment, investigators said.

In July 2020, Griffiths solicited a $70,000 investment from another investor, according to authorities. In order to get more money, Griffiths provided the investor with information, printed on title company letterhead, that showed the potential of the requested investment, federal prosecutors said.

However, the investor later contacted the title company and found that Griffiths had altered the information provided by the title company to intentionally omit numerous preexisting encumbrances on the property, investigators said.

The investor lost their entire $70,000 from the first investment, authorities said.