My group, IMS produced the controversial documentary, "We Need to talk about Sandy Hook." It was the work of 30+ individuals distilled into a series of segments narrated by the 10 individuals that produced them. Even 2:45:00 wasn't enough time to cover each anomaly, which is partly why it didn't cover the "free homes" theory.

One of our researchers in particular did extensive work on the x-mas 2009 home sales. But what they found on that topic isn't the topic of my comment. It's what they found related to that topic that I found interesting and think should be shared here. This may be a bigger scandal, but I'm honestly still unsure if it's Sandy Hook Shooting related.

As we were collaborating on the documentary project, 9 months in total I kept hearing about the free homes and evidence being collected. I wasn't yet convinced it was good enough evidence to include in our project. As it turns out, that question was put on the back burner when evidence of something else began to emerge. Eventually, I was compelled enough to set up a one-on-one meeting with the researcher uncovering the evidence and later began working to collaborate their findings. We soon gave the project the code name, "The Maple Drive Report."

Sadly, before our work was complete we had our private Google Drive account compromised and all of our research material posted to the Internet. It won't surprise many here to learn that it first turned up on Lenny Pozner's Google+ account. That event, along with others led our group to stop using any un-encrypted web service and to stop working on The Maple Drive Report. We worked very hard to keep a lid on it and this was a total reveal of everything we had.

In short, research into mortgages in the city of Newtown CT began turning up indications of fraud. After we saw examples of the fraud were so wide-spread, we thought it would be a good idea to pick a single street and reveal just the examples on that street for simplicity. We chose Maple Dr., an iconic American street name.

Not being mortgage or real-estate experts ourselves, we sought the help of a few trusted individuals and one suggested we should use a basic set of metrics to measure the extent of the fraud. We settled on the "Fannie Mae - Common Mortgage Fraud Red Flags."

I won't be posting any specific data here except to identify that the street in question is Maple Drive in Newtown, on which there are only 16 homes. After obtaining all the publicly available mortgage information for those homes we thought, how can we obtain help from un-trusted mortgage experts without tipping off the perpetrators of the fraud? The only way I felt comfortable sharing our findings is if we cloaked each entity with a fake identity. In that way, the evidence could be analysed without knowing "where" the homes were. So, Mr. & Mrs. Real-Seller would become Mr. & Mrs. Fake-Seller in our report. But before that, we reached out to some experts in the field to get a sense of who might want to help. Very few seemed willing.

First, we discovered over 200 mortgages in only a 5 year period involving only those 16 homes. That's way, way above the standard rate. Second, we found tell-tale signs of fraud in how the sale prices of some homes increased dramatically in only a short time, sometimes in only a few months or less.

But where we knew we were onto something is when we found very unusual mortgage circumstances. I'll try to map out a simple example. It would begin when Party A would sell their home to Party B in August of a certain year. But then, surprisingly as soon as September of the same year Party B would sell the home back to Party A. Sales of this kind happened more than once, adding to the unusually high mortgage total.

Another type of unusual transaction involved a home selling for much less that it had recently sold for. For example, Home A would sell in 2009 for $260,000. Then, less than a year later Home A would sell again for only $170,000. You might think that could be explained by someone giving a good deal to a child or other relative. But in those cases, of which there were examples on Maple Drive the sale price is usually $1.

Having stepped away from the topic and not knowing what may have become of the investigation by others, I'm still left puzzled. We seem to have uncovered wide-spread mortgage fraud in CT, not necessarily connected to the Sandy Hook Shooting event. It reminds me of what I learned from a brilliant researcher years ago. They claimed that very often two financial instruments are used in tandem to profit from real estate, the title and the mortgage. My memory is fuzzy on the details but their explanation was very compelling at the time.

I hope this side-story is helpful in understanding what the scale of the problem may actually be and maybe in uncovering solid evidence of $0 home sales for Sandy Hook fraud participants.