A New Jersey real estate investor was sentenced to five years in prison this week for his role in a mortgage fraud scheme involving Freddie Mac.

Aron Puretz was sentenced to the maximum possible sentence and ordered to pay $22M in restitution after he pleaded guilty to a $55M fraud scheme that included forged financial statements and purchase contracts.

While leading Apex Equity Group, Puretz and his co-conspirators misled lenders about at least three properties from 2016 to 2022.

Puretz pleaded guilty to presenting inflated purchase and sales documents to Freddie Mac to secure a mortgage that exceeded a property’s true purchase price in 2017. Two years later, Puretz purchased the Big Country Chateau apartments in Little Rock, Arkansas, but hid his role in the deal from Freddie Mac because the lender would not approve loans for his properties.

By 2020 the fraud had gotten larger, with Puretz and his co-conspirators acquiring the Troy Technology Park outside Detroit for $43M before presenting lenders with fake documents putting the sale price at $70M.

Puretz pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud affecting a financial institution.

The Troy Technology Park case also led to the conviction of Puretz’s son and Boruch Drillman on one count of wire fraud each, according to The Real Deal, which first reported the sentencing. Drillman, an investor also facing scrutiny for a deal in Chicago, pleaded guilty last December.

Steven Yurowitz, the New York-based attorney representing Puretz, and the Department of Justice didn’t respond to a request for comment early Tuesday.

The sentencing this week comes as the federally backed lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are tightening standards and working to root out fraud from their books. Fannie Mae acknowledged for the first time in its third-quarter statements that it was investigating multiple lenders for potential mortgage fraud.

The investigations began spilling into the public sphere last November, when New York-based Meridian Capital, one of the country’s largest brokers of commercial mortgages, was temporarily banned from doing deals with Freddie Mac pending the outcome of an investigation.

The mortgage giant eventually got back into the good graces of the secondary-market lender, which announced in October that it will restart doing business with the firm in January.

Meridian’s loans will face additional scrutiny and financial backstops that are not typical for Freddie Mac. Meridian also replaced its CEO in March, replacing the firm’s founder with Brian Brooks, a former Fannie Mae employee and acting U.S. comptroller of the currency.

More recently, Eastern Union Funding and Sevenstone Capital were suspended from doing deals with Fannie Mae earlier this month.