Pair face a year in jail

A Costa Mesa woman and her accomplice who took thousands of dollars from homeowners with promises of refinancing their mortgages could be sentenced to a year in county jail at their sentencing next month, one of their attorneys said Thursday.

Marianne Curtis, 69, and Mary Alice Yraceburu, 46, of Riverdale, Calif., pleaded guilty Thursday to 71 felony counts of grand theft and taking a consultant fee before performing any refinancing services. The two pleaded guilty as part of a plea agreement offered by Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert Fitzgerald.

Both pleaded guilty for a sentence of one year in jail and shared restitution of $38,000, which is all the money prosecutors could link to the two, said Curtis’ attorney, Scott B. Well. Curtis will also be allowed to apply for house arrest in place of jail time, he said.

When the attorney general’s office announced the women’s charges in March 2009, they said they “coldly and heartlessly” conned more than 160 people out of hundreds of thousands for non-existent loan modifications. That wasn’t true, Well said.

They accepted a fee between $500 and $1,500 from their victims and made real efforts to modify their loans, but in almost every case were unsuccessful, he said.

“This whole [financial] crisis wasn’t caused by these people,” he said. The crime, Well acknowledged, was accepting money before performing any services.

Prosecutors offered their own plea deals to the women. One would have given each woman six years in prison, then a later deal that would’ve given them three years each, he said. Prosecutors were unavailable for comment Thursday.

In their announcement last year, officials from the attorney general’s office said most of Curtis and Yraceburu’s victims went into bankruptcy or lost their homes because of the scam.

The women are scheduled to be sentenced April 9 at Santa Ana’s Central Justice Center.