This latest Star Tribune article has me irked… which seems to be happening a lot lately.

Donald T. Yeager, you’ve just found guilty of participating in a $100 million mortgage fraud scheme, what are you going to do now?  “I’m going to jail for a little over a year.”

-hypothetical interview with the most recent guy to get off too easy

The guy makes a paltry $30,000 as an active participant in the scamming the buyers and mortgage companies (and their investors) in a $100 million dollar mortgage scheme and loses only 15 months of his freedom.  Here are some other criminals in this scheme.

By estimates published in the Star Tribune, losses are in the range of $20M – $50M.  Some of the people convicted were involved with dozens of the transactions, some were involved in all 200 of them.  Imagine if it was 200 counts of burglary… what would the sentence be?  Why can’t we prosecute white collar criminals more harshly?  Let’s start nailing some of these people under the R.I.C.O. Act  and get serious about fraud.