Matt Cox: Catch Me If You Can — The Mortgage Fraud Mastermind

“The very first loan I did had fraud in it. And then it just kept going from there.”

Matt Cox didn’t stumble into mortgage fraud. He sprinted toward it with both arms open. When I sat down with him, I expected to hear about regret and redemption. What I got instead was a masterclass in how the system works—and how one man exploited every crack in it for over a decade.

Dyslexia, Art School, and the Road to Fraud

Matt grew up with severe dyslexia—both auditory and visual. He failed second grade. His father, a State Farm manager who worked 70-80 hours a week and went on drunken binges, told him he’d never amount to much in the “smart world.” His college counselor said the same thing.

So Matt got a degree in Fine Arts from USF. “It prepared me to do pretty much nothing,” he told me, laughing.

He bounced around—insurance adjuster, construction jobs—until a girlfriend who was putting herself through college as a stripper landed a job at a mortgage company. She told Matt he had to try it. Within months, he was closing loans. Within his first deal, he was committing fraud.

The White-Out That Started Everything

His first borrower had been 30 days late on rent. Deal killer. His manager pulled out a bottle of white-out and shook it up.

“White it out, make a copy, stick it in the file. They’ll never catch it,” she said. “I do it all the time.”

Matt was terrified. He did it anyway. The loan closed. He got a check for $3,500. The next borrower didn’t quite make enough money—so Matt changed the W2s. The one after that had a different problem. And another. And another.

“I started realizing almost all my customers had an issue,” Matt said. “And I could make it work.”

Creating Banks, Identities, and an Empire

What started as white-out on documents evolved into something far more sophisticated. Matt created fake banks—complete with websites, phone numbers, and color bank statements. He built employment verification companies. He learned how to get Social Security to issue numbers to people who didn’t exist.

The process was almost elegant in its audacity: create a birth certificate for a fictional 10-month-old baby, get Social Security to issue a number, open secured credit cards, build credit for six months, then buy properties.

“I could tell them what I was doing and the FBI had never seen anything like it,” Matt said. “But I wasn’t doing anything new. I was just combining all the pieces in a way nobody else had thought to.”

He named his synthetic identities after Simpsons characters. C. Montgomery Burns. The FBI was not amused.

Caught, Released, and Running

In 2002, Matt got caught when a former employee wore a wire for the FBI. He pled guilty, got probation, and agreed to stop. Instead, he opened a new company under someone else’s name and scaled up. Way up.

When a sheriff’s deputy friend warned him that a federal task force was coming, Matt grabbed $80,000 in cash, his girlfriend, and ran. For three years.

He refinanced houses he didn’t own. He satisfied mortgages that weren’t paid off. He borrowed $450,000 from three hard money lenders against the same property in the same week. He forged passports—over 20 of them, all issued legitimately by the State Department under fake identities.

“I wasn’t thinking I was going to get caught,” Matt admitted. “I had been pulled over by cops, gotten tickets. I had real driver’s licenses in other people’s names. I wasn’t worried.”

26 Years and 4 Months

When they finally caught him in Charlotte, North Carolina, Matt was looking at what prosecutors said could be 300 years. He pled guilty and got 26 years and 4 months.

“It was a bad day,” he said simply.

He did 13 years at Coleman Federal Prison in Florida. His mother came to visit every two weeks for the entire sentence. His father died while he was inside. His sisters never came.

Teaching Real Estate Behind Bars

In prison, Matt started teaching. First GED classes. Then a real estate course through the adult continuing education program. He taught inmates how to read property records, understand foreclosures, and flip houses—legally.

“How many people are here for drugs?” he’d ask his class. Almost everyone would raise their hand. “This is the one time being a drug dealer is going to work to your benefit. You’re not afraid of those neighborhoods. You have a hustler mentality no other investor will ever compete with.”

Guys who took his class started sending him money after they got out. Not much—$50, $100—but they were flipping properties. They were using what he taught them.

The Takeaway That Hit Hardest

When I asked Matt what he learned from all of it, his answer surprised me.

“Money doesn’t make you happy,” he said. “I had tons of money when I was committing fraud. And I was desperately trying to impress people who didn’t even like me. They were around because I paid for their vacations.”

He was happier in prison, he told me. No status games. No one wanting anything from him except his company. Just a group of guys who liked hanging out with him because they genuinely liked him.

“It’s the great equalizer,” Matt said about prison. “Doesn’t matter where you were born or what color your skin is. You meet guys and you realize pretty quick who’s a good person and who’s a scumbag. And it has nothing to do with their crime.”

Matt Cox got out in 2019. He hosts the Inside True Crime podcast. He speaks at mortgage conventions. He sells paintings—he does have that Fine Arts degree, after all. And he’s finally telling his own story, not through Dateline’s editing or American Greed’s spin, but in his own words.

You can find Matt at his podcast Inside True Crime or on YouTube under Matt Cox.