Alexander Sivels II, Mortgage Fraud, MD 2024

Baltimore’s housing market was the battleground for a ruthless mortgage fraud ring that saw real estate consultant Alexander Sivels, II, 32, of Baltimore, and agent Christopher A. Kwegan, 59, of Randallstown, Maryland, exploit desperate buyers and gullible lenders for profit. Both were sentenced this week to 27 months in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release, for their roles in schemes that vaporized more than $1.8 million in losses and left neighborhoods littered with foreclosures.

U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar handed down the sentences—Kwegan today, Sivels yesterday—after both men pleaded guilty to federal charges. Sivels was ordered to pay restitution of $1,317,314.35; Kwegan must repay $530,641.27. The hammer came from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, FBI, HUD-OIG, and the Secret Service, all of which called the crimes a direct assault on financial integrity and urban stability.

Sivels, owner of Royal Real Estate Consultants LLC, ran a machine of deception between 2008 and 2011, orchestrating the fraudulent sale of at least nine properties—every one later seized through foreclosure. He and co-conspirator Cecil Chester of Hyattsville, Maryland, recruited buyers who couldn’t qualify for loans, then forged tax returns, pay stubs, and bank statements to fabricate their financial viability. Houses were inflated in price, loans approved under false pretenses, and cash funneled to Sivels and renovator Andreas Tamaris, who demanded fixed returns on his investments.

From just four of those scams, Sivels pocketed over $200,000 in illicit profits, all while knowing the loans were doomed. In 2010 and 2011, he escalated the fraud by falsifying employment verifications, claiming buyers worked for his renovation company—a fiction created solely to grease the wheels of deception and collect more cash at closing.

Kwegan’s scheme was narrower but equally cold. In summer 2008, he targeted the owner of a Washington Boulevard row house who had bought it a decade earlier for $11,500. Seeing blood in the water, Kwegan promised a lucrative sale, then manipulated the transaction to defraud lenders of more than $530,000. His guilty plea confirmed his role in the sale of two properties designed to collapse the moment the money changed hands.

“Mortgage fraud perpetrators steal by inducing lenders to make loans that will never be repaid, and they harm neighborhoods when the inevitable foreclosures drive down property values,” said U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein. In Baltimore, where recovery from urban decay is fragile, crimes like these don’t just break laws—they break communities. Sivels and Kwegan now have two years to reflect on that behind federal bars.