Litigation

Suspect in title company fraud to be charged with felonies

By Tracy Coenen

In March I wrote about a case involving Parkview Title Service and a mom and daughter team that allegedly stole huge sums of money from it. In mid-2006, Bill Molkenthen (the owner of Parkview) believed that Bobbi Moths and her daughter Jamie Wilson were stealing from him, using the money to pay personal bills like mortgages and other personal expenses. He estimates that the theft was over $200,000, and he went to the police with his suspicions. As the case was heating up, Wilson committed suicide.

Bobbi Moths opened Excel Title on Hampton Avenue after the Waukesha location of Parkview closed, but a June 5 report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said that Moths has closed Excel.

And now my sources indicate to me that on May 22, Bobbi Moths appeared at the Waukesha police station to be booked on three felony counts related to the Parkview fraud. Additional felony charges in the case are supposedly forthcoming. It’s been said that the IRS is investigating Moths as well.

A little more history on the case:

In early 2004, Parkview Title Service opens a Waukesha location, with Bobbi Moths overseeing the operations. She almost immediately hires her daughter Jamie to work there. Within a month, Jamie allegedly begins paying her $2,500 a month home mortgage from the company’s trust account.

In early 2006, there is an offer from Moths and her husband to buy Parkview Title. This never really goes anywhere due to happenings in the Moths family. Wauwatosa Credit Union sues Parkview Title around this time and gets a default judgment for over $22,000 since the lawsuit was “overlooked” and never answered. The judgment is thrown out in July 2006, and the case is settled privately.

In June 2006, more problems surface. The IRS is sending notices of unpaid taxes and an underwriter wants to perform an audit but Moths stalls for more time. She tells Molkenthen she’s taking care of all of it, but that a computer has crashed and there is no information available for the trust account. (This is the account from which the alleged theft occurred.)

Moths quits Parkview Title in September 2006, and the following month, the bank notifies Molkenthen that a loan funding of over $100,000 has bounced due to insufficient funds in the trust account. Then Parkview Title receives a call from someone whose home sale had closed many months earlier, who was still owed $83,000. Molkenthen checked the company’s records, and a check for $83,000 had cleared the bank… but was deposited by Jamie Wilson into a personal account.

Wilson commits suicide in November 2006 after bank investigators contact her to discuss checks she deposited into her personal account.

Molkenthen tries to unravel everything that occurred while Bobbi Moths worked for him, and he finds that she was holding herself out as an owner of Parkview Title. (She was not.) While pretending to be an owner, Moths allegedly got credit cards in the company’s name and opened a bank account in the name of the company, none of which was known by the real owner.

More information as it becomes available.

Full post as published by The FRAUDfiles Blog on June 17, 2008 (boomark / email).