A man who posed as a mortgage broker was sentenced this morning to 70 months in prison, federal prosecutors said.

Jared Tornow, of San Clemente, and others falsified documents on $40 million in loans, costing lenders more than $7 million in losses so far, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

United States District Judge David Carter sentenced Tornow, 34, for tax evasion, mail fraud and credit card fraud.

Dean Steward, Tornow’s attorney, said, “Jared has accepted full responsibility for what happened, and he is looking forward to getting on with the rest of his life.”

Here’s more from prosecutors:

According to court documents, Tornow fraudulently provided mortgage services from 2001 until 2006 through several companies, including Lucrativo Real Estate Solutions, which he operated with Mikhail Kosachevich during the last two years of the scheme. Tornow solicited home buyers and assisted  them in obtaining mortgages, often by submitting fraudulent paperwork to lending banks. As a part of the scheme, Tornow and others inflated borrowers’ income and assets on loan applications, leading lenders to believe that their clients were creditworthy. In an effort to substantiate the false statements made on the loan applications, Tornow and others fabricated W-2 forms, paycheck stubs, bank statements and other documents. Relying upon the false statements made on loan applications by Tornow and others, lenders issued more than $40 million in residential loans to Tornow’s clients. When a number of the properties went into foreclosure, the banks suffered losses of more than $7 million.

Tornow and his co-schemers received hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions and payments from loans that were funded based upon their false statements and submission of fraudulent documents to lenders. Tornow concealed his commission income from the Internal Revenue Service and failed to pay more than $300,000 in federal income taxes. Tornow, who had been ordered not to work in the mortgage industry by California authorities about 10 years ago, used the names of legitimate brokers when he submitted loan packages to lenders. To cash the commission checks he received in the name of licensed brokers, Tornow created fictitious business names that were similar to the companies whose names appeared on the checks, and then cashed the commission checks at a check-cashing business.

Judge Carter ordered Tornow to return to court on March 3 to determine the amount of restitution he will pay to lenders.

Kosachevich pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering and faces up to 25 years in prison. A third man involved in the scheme, Jeffrey Gerken, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and faces up to five years in prison.

Judge Carter is scheduled to sentence both men on January 25.

By the way, this news organization in September wrote about Tornow planning to convert a million-dollar home into a rehabilitation center. Here’s a photo of Tornow from that story: