U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania recently issued the following announcement on Dec. 06.
U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain announced that David Fili, Jr., 48, of Drexel Hill, PA, was sentenced by United States District Judge Joel H. Slomsky to one day in jail and five years of supervised release, with the first 18 months of supervised release to be served on home confinement. Significantly, the defendant was ordered to forfeit $1,969,312.02, and is jointly and severally liable to pay $9,567,074.56 in restitution. Fili previously entered a guilty plea to ten counts of wire fraud and two counts of bank fraud.
Along with George Barnard, 47, of Newtown Square, PA, Fili owned Capital Financial Mortgage Corporation (“CFMC”), based in Delaware County, PA. Between 2005 and March 2013, Fili and Barnard issued refinance mortgage loans to customers of CFMC. Instead of using the money to pay off their customers’ outstanding first mortgages, however, they diverted $9,781,977 to themselves from bank accounts belonging to CFMC and several title companies owned by Barnard. Barnard was previously sentenced to five years in prison for his role in the scheme.
As part of his guilty plea, Fili admitted that he used much of the money he diverted to buy a vacation home and to support his gambling habit (while Barnard used the money he diverted to buy multi-million dollar beach homes in Avalon, New Jersey, several yachts, and to pay the salary of a yacht captain). At the time that the scheme fell apart in March 2013, Fili and Barnard left over two dozen CFMC customers stuck with two mortgages on their homes because CFMC had failed to pay off their customers’ existing first mortgages.
“For many years, Fili defrauded honest, hard-working individuals out of their money so that he could gamble it away and relax in his illegally-obtained vacation home, “ said U.S. Attorney McSwain. “The defendant’s vacation ends now. We are thankful that the Court ordered him to pay millions of dollars as a result of his crimes.”
Original source can be found here.