Drive through Baltimore’s city center, and you’ll see street after street of historical row homes, many of them more than 100 years old.
Roughly half of the city’s 300,000 or so housing units are decades-old historical row houses, though their condition and quality vary greatly. Baltimore is a city of contradictions, full of history and East Coast charm, but struggling with affordability. Around 20% of the city’s 577,000 residents live below the poverty line, making it one of the poorest urban centers in the country.
Those factors may be what make it particularly susceptible to bad actors in the real estate market. For decades, the city has struggled with an epidemic of slumlords who have let thousands of properties remain vacant and in disrepair. The vacancies are estimated to cost around $200 million annually in combined lost tax revenue and public service expenditures.
Baltimore has also dealt with its fair share of real estate fraudsters, who see the fragile Baltimore market—where much of the population is ill-resourced to defend itself against financial crimes—as fertile ground to make fast cash.
In 2025, the Baltimore Banner launched an investigation into Eluzer Gold and Benjamin Eidlisz, two New York real estate investors who purchased more than 700 homes in the Baltimore area. The outlet published evidence suggesting the pair had perpetrated an elaborate scheme to profit off of distressed real estate in the city, particularly in Black neighborhoods.
Now, two lawsuits filed in federal court last month have ratcheted up pressure on officials to investigate. The lawsuits claim that Gold, Eidlisz, and a raft of co-conspirators violated federal racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations (RICO) statutes, costing lenders more than $24 million.
The lawsuits claim they did so by selling homes between entities they controlled and defaulting on the mortgages, making off with millions in profits and triggering foreclosures on dozens of properties throughout the city.
The Banner reported that there is an ongoing FBI investigation into Gold, Eidlisz, and their alleged co-conspirators, though the FBI told Realtor.com® that, according to policy, “it could not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.”
How the alleged fraud worked
On Sept. 9, Ameritrust Mortgage Corp. filed a 60-page lawsuit in Maryland District Court alleging Gold, Eidlisz, and a third man, Shraga Chaim Lerner, perpetuated an extensive real estate
fraud ring to secure 90 loans worth more than $14 million, with the aim of defaulting on those loans and pocketing the cash.
A week later, RCN Capital LLC and Commercial Lender LLC filed a 175-page lawsuit stating similar claims. It accuses Gold, Eidlisz, and their co-conspirators of defrauding them out of an additional $10 million on a total of 59 properties purchased and defaulted upon between 2023 and 2024.
To perpetrate the fraud, the suits allege, Eidlisz used a variety of shell companies to purchase low-cost and distressed Baltimore properties—most of which were priced between $40,000 and $60,000. The lenders say he then sold the properties to more than a dozen LLCs operated by Gold for three and four times the original price, often flipping them within days or weeks of his original purchase.
To justify the new inflated price, the lawsuit alleges, Eidlisz employed a group of co-conspirators to submit artificially inflated fraudulent appraisals that featured doctored and fake photographs and descriptions. He also omitted the prior-sale history of the property in his applications.
As the Ameritrust Mortgage lawsuit explains, the flips occurred so quickly that the seller “could not have (and did not) renovate the property as represented and, in fact, often never took physical possession of the property or possessed it only briefly.”
The RCN lawsuit names a raft of appraisers as co-defendants that it says contributed to the group’s ability to continually take out loans for triple and quadruple what a property had just been sold for.
“The Lenders would not have made any of the loans … had they received an industry compliant appraisal valuing the real property because each such appraisal materially overvalued the property and caused the Lenders’ loan to value underwriting standard to be breached,” the lawsuit says.
In some cases, the lawsuits allege, Gold applied for loans using Eidlisz’ email address and at one time, Eidlisz signed Gold’s name on a credit application.
While the group reportedly purchased around 700 properties across the city, often in low-income neighborhoods, the two lawsuits specifically address around 150 properties, the vast majority of which were foreclosed upon.
As an example of how the scheme worked, according to lenders, Eidlisz purchased 1829 N. Bond St. in March 2023 for $43,000. In July 2023 he sold it to Levy Ventures, an LLC registered to Gold, for an astounding $310,000. But the pair let the property fall into disrepair, and it was eventually foreclosed upon. When it returned to the market in August 2026, clearly showing no sign of renovation, it was listed for $35,000, the lawsuits say.
Debt service ratio loans fund the alleged fraud
The two lawsuits represent a fraction of the $100 million in debt service coverage ratio (DSCR) loans—a type of hard-money loan—the pair are believed to have taken out.
Debt service coverage ratio loans allow institutional investors to borrow money based on projected rental income, rather than personal income.
“It’s leverage at scale,” explains Josh Jankelow, president and founder of Olympus Financial, a mortgage broker and lender that deals in DSCR loans.
“Most DSCR loans close in an LLC and don’t report to personal credit,” he explains. “When that borrower applies for the next loan, the lender typically looks only at what they own personally, like a primary residence. Properties held in LLCs often never come up. That’s how one borrower can stack hundreds of loans across lenders who each see only their own file.”
DSCRs can be “lifesavers” for a solid investor, says Jankelow. But they’re also rife with opportunity for “nefarious” operators.
With a traditional loan, “standards are set by the federal government when it comes to who you can select in as an appraiser, and the amount of contact that the loan officer or buyer or anyone that works with the loan officer can have with the appraiser.
“If people had nefarious plans to do some sort of loan scheme, on the conventional end, there’d be a million safeguards in place. Anytime values increase like that in the short term, there’s heavy, heavy, heavy investigation,” he continues. “The odds of a value inflating 300%, 400%, 500% in a few months are slim to none. Any reasonable appraiser is going to say, ‘Hold on, this thing sold three months ago for $40,000. How are we getting $250,000 right now? The market doesn’t support it.'”
Permits were never pulled on the vast majority of properties the pair purchased, signaling that rehab work that might have justified an increased purchase price was never done.
“With DSCR loans, if there is a bad guy appraiser and some bad actors, it becomes a lot easier for them all to work together” he says. “Conventional lenders will say even if this is an investment, how many other properties does this guy own? How leveraged is he? The nature of DSCR for businesses is that they don’t look at that.”
Still, says Jankelow, “The great, great, great majority of people who are using these loans are just trying to build a real estate portfolio. At it’s best, it’s a really cool tool, though it brewed a perfect storm of a scam.”
Baltimore’s market bears the brunt
A year after the scheme was first revealed, it continues to have an impact on Baltimore’s housing market and its residents.
While many of the homes Gold, Eidlisz, and Lerner purchased were vacant at the time, renters living at some of the addresses expressed shock and dismay at discovering foreclosure notices at their addresses.
Per Maryland law, tenants are able to remain in foreclosed properties until the terms of their lease end. But for people on fixed incomes, it can be difficult to come up with the deposit necessary to move houses.
In 2025, when Banner’s reporting first dropped, Baltimore saw a 26% increase in foreclosures year over year. A year later, foreclosure levels remain elevated. According to August 2026 data from real estate analytics firm ATTOM, Baltimore’s greater metro area ranked 18th in terms of per capita foreclosures. But Baltimore city ranks fifth in per capita foreclosures, with 1 in every 677 homes foreclosed upon.
Will Rapuano of Pruitt Title, who handles closing transactions across Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC, says that though these types of foreclosures are often concentrated in specific neighborhoods, “the damage there is real. Foreclosures pull values down on the surrounding blocks, tenants face displacement, and the private lenders who got burned have pulled back. That makes it harder for honest investors to finance the rehabs those same neighborhoods need.”
While both of these lawsuits were filed in civil court, criminal charges may be on the horizon soon. The FBI investigation into Gold and Eidlisz is ongoing.
An additional complaint filed by Pigtown Portfolio LLC and East Baltimore Investments II LLC earlier this year claims that the pair also engaged in deed fraud. The suit alleges that Eidlisz falsely represented himself as a managing member in the properties and sold them to Gelt Ventures LLC, an entity owned by Eidlisz and Gold, using financing to make the purchase. That case is currently making its way through federal court.
It appears that the courts have begun to take action, at least with similar cases. Earlier this year, a U.S. District judge sentenced Alexander Schultz and his attorney Jacob Rappaport to two months and 15 months, respectively, for their involvement in a similar scheme.
In December 2021, Schultz purchased 42 homes across Baltimore for $87,500 each. He then worked with a group of co-conspirators to artificially inflate the price of the homes and sold the properties on the same day for $6.9 million, netting a one-day profit of more than $3 million.
The homes were sold again in 2023 for $9.9 million to Zahav Ventures LLC, one of the dozen or so LLCs backed by Gold and Eidlisz, according to prosecutors.
Today, those properties are in foreclosure.
Lawyers for Eidlisz and Gold have not yet appeared in the court record. Realtor.com has reached out to Eidlisz for comment.
