When you consider purchasing a house with the help of a mortgage, you must first find out how much home loan amount you can afford to repay on time. How much of an expensive house you can purchase depends on the amount you can get. So, before searching for your dream house, ask yourself -“how much house can I afford?”. After you find a house you can afford, shop around to find a mortgage at a favorable interest rate. While shopping around, don’t forget to check the service background of the lenders. There are various fraudulent lenders who scam borrowers in different ways. So, it is necessary to find a reliable lender.

How can fraudulent lenders scam you? Fraudulent mortgage lenders can scam you in various ways. The most common scams are: • Inflated appraisal: Lenders get your home appraised to determine the size of the mortgage they will offer you. Fraudulent lenders inflate the appraised value and offer you a larger loan amount. Larger mortgage will require you to make high monthly payments and this is how these lenders defraud you to make high profit. • Not disclose fees upfront: To obtain a home loan, you have to pay a number of fees, starting from origination fee to underwriting fee. Scammers do not disclose all these types of costs upfront and later charge you with hefty fees. How can you prevent getting scammed? Some of the tips to help you prevent yourself from falling into traps of fraudulent lenders are: • Verify the value of property: Gather information about the prices of similar kind of houses in the neighborhood. You can also consider taking help of an independent appraiser to verify the value of your property. • Ask for good faith estimate: Ask you lender to provide you with the good faith estimate of all the costs that you have to bear in order to obtain the home loan. • Read documents before signing: You must read and understand each and every document before signing them. You should also ask your lender to provide you with copies of all documents that you sign. Apart from lenders, you can also be defrauded by mortgage brokers. So, when you’re considering obtaining service of a broker, check its reputation. You can ask your friends and relatives for referrals. In this way, you can easily find a reliable mortgage professional and obtain a home loan that will suit your needs and affordability the best.

I have always liked the various regional fraud forums (or should it be fora?). They provide a great networking event for me as a forensic accountant specialising in fraud to attend. Since meeting with Northumbria Police ‘s Phil Butler prior to the inaugural North East Fraud Forum event – must be as far back as 2003 – I have been attending these events – including the North West Fraud Forum and the London Fraud Forum. I spoke at the very first one and have given talks at them subsequently. There are other fora around the country, but you can only attend so many networking events!

In my own area, Yorkshire and Humber, I had been attempting to get a local fraud forum galvanised for some time. I remember working with a leading fraud lawyer from DLA Piper to interest some of our public sector colleagues to spark off a similar regional forum. This was back in 2004/2005. My lawyer friend was tasked with getting the Leeds City Council interested and I was to do the same with the local West Yorkshire Police force. Unfortunately neither of us had much success – perhaps we were not very good at lobbying or working the “politics” of the matter. My own response from the then acting DI of the WY Fraud Office was negative – and that I should seek to attend the North East Fraud Forum for any networking I wanted to do!

Thankfully that officer has moved on now and there is indeed a Yorkshire and Humberside regional Fraud Forum in operation – set up by the sterling efforts of others I must say, though I continue to be a strong supporter. It does get a lot of support from the police forces, not just West Yorkshire but North Yorkshire, Humberside and South Yorkshire forces as well as various other leading organisations and bodies.

In fact Paul Welton of Humberside Police Economic Crime Unit called me last week and asked if I would like to speak to BBC Humberside about why I attended the forum and I said that I would be delighted to help. I was to chat to Andy Comfort on his breakfast programme on Monday morning of the 7th of June – the same day as one of the forums events “Tackling Business Fraud” (that I was attending later that day).

So this morning – eight o’clock approaches and I am sitting nervously waiting for my phone call – a list of prepared responses as to why I attended Yorkshire and Humberside Fraud Forum’s events.  Of course once the call comes all preparation goes out of the window – we chat about fraud live on radio for well over 10 minutes and how it is an increasing problem today. It certainly focuses the mind – what are the problems that fraud poses for us today and how do we tackle it? The fraud forums are only a small part of the answer, but they do go a little way to illustrate the importance of the public and private sectors working together – something that all seem to voice but few ever look practically to see how it can work.

The police will tell you that they are under-resourced when it comes to dealing with cases of fraud – it is not surprising as fraud investigations are extremely labour intensive. I understand that there are only something like 400 – 500 full time police officers working in the various fraud squads around the uk. Compare that to a typical fraud, maybe worth around £250,000 in losses to the victim – might take up the full time of at least one if not more police officers – for 6 months, a year or even longer. Then consider that the level of fraud is estimated to cost the UK some £30.2 billion per year (as estimated by the National Fraud Authority and probably a vast underestimate) and you will see why the police alone can only chip at the surface of the fraud problem.

Other agencies investigate fraud of course – we have the Serious Fraud Office – that the new government is considering combining with the Financial Services Authority and Office of Fair Trading’s fraud investigation wings – to form a more powerful Economic Crime Agency.  We have  investigators from the Department For Business Innovation and Skills and from HMRC as well as from other agencies – all investigating fraud.

But what we really do need – and this is exactly in tune with David Cameron’s fight against public sector waste of recent years – is a much closer involvement of the private sector in the fight against fraud generally. I would like to see this achieved by the utilisation of private sector investigation resources and financial fraud specialists – using transparent tendering methods based on obtaining the best quality of services at the most reasonable prices.

It is difficult to believe that we are already into month 6 of 2010. It only seems like yesterday that I returned from my holiday in New York to the minus 15 degree centigrade weather at Manchester Airport at the beginning of January! Now five months later and we have a new Conservative government (Liberally tempered of course) in power and the promise of some sense being brought to the UK. Sense that is after some massive cuts in all the areas of public spending that generally pay my bills! Time for some radical thinking or what?

Actually I do not see the pressure on public spending as a problem. As somebody who has always operated on a “value based” approach instead of the professionals’ normal “hourly based fee” I find that I still remain competitive in all areas of publicly funded fraud activities. This includes working for the fraud regulators and undertaking expert witness work funded by the Legal Services Commission.

However, it is no good being simply “competitive” these days. Promise of results should be most important. In the field of dealing with fraud matters this can be very difficult and yet I believe that one of the fraud investigators’ biggest developing markets is the smaller company or individual who has lost money to the crooks. This is the sector that seems to have the hardest time sorting out the problems caused by the fraudster. Identity theft causes disproportionate distress to the victims compared to the financial; lo0ss they suffer. They also lose credit ratings and the ability to operate in today’s digital environment. Gone are the days that we were paid in cash and bought everything we needed using the same. The loss of a few hundred pounds by a family can cause huge hardship, and thousands of such victims together will provide millions of income for the organised fraudsters.

It is important that smaller losses are investigated. There should be little attention paid to proportionality where crime is involved, but when it comes to trying to get £10,000 back from an employee theft this does not seem to be the case. The only way I have been able to help victims in such smaller cases is to write a letter for them after a brief look at the case details and one or two documents – for them to take to the police. such a letter can cause the authorities to sit up and take note – it is sort of a mini- fraud investigation report that serves to illustrate the seriousness of the loss and show that further investigation will bear fruit. By spending a little on such a letter can stimulate interest and even provide a focus for other victims to band together and fund a worthwhile asset recover action. First Stage Investigation Services are intended to be a cost effective solution to the situation where the level of loss does not merit huge sums being invested in recovery action but can serve either as a catalyst for more substantial regulatory action (and compensation) or can even promote a negotiated settlement in some cases.