Text messages reveal fraud in ABC Capital meltdown, new lawsuit claims

ABC Capital employees created fake email addresses, forged signatures, falsified wire transactions and faked deeds as part of a scheme to defraud unsuspecting overseas investors seeking to purchase Baltimore real estate, according to the latest lawsuit over the company’s collapse.

Text messages and voice memo transcripts included in the complaint, filed Thursday in Baltimore Circuit Court, provide new insight into the company’s inner workings. The filing reveals employees joking about doing a “hack job” of faking signatures. It also alleges that documents show how employees forged a notary’s stamp and used virtual private networks to appear to be in other countries when sending emails posing as clients.

“Make up a name,” ABC Capital proprietor Jay Walsh told another employee in a voice memo, according to the complaint. “Like a Turkish name, like Omar something, for the buyer. ... You’re gonna sign that.”

Thiru Vignarajah, an attorney for a group of jilted investors who filed the suit, said the evidence indicates “one of the largest real estate frauds in modern Maryland history.”

“Walsh directed and coached a diffuse global web of unwitting and knowing accomplices to execute these frauds, effectively cheating hundreds of bona fide investors from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote in the lawsuit.

While investors have pleaded for local or federal authorities to bring criminal charges, Walsh has only faced civil actions and a single criminal charge of acting as a contractor without a license, brought by a little-known division of the Maryland Department of Labor. He was convicted and ordered to pay $20,500 in restitution to one victim.

The Banner first began reporting in 2022 how Walsh’s company sold more than 1,000 homes in distressed areas to investors across the globe. The Philadelphia-based company, ABC Capital, promised a hands-off process in which Walsh would acquire the homes, fix them up, then rent them out and maintain them.

In scores of lawsuits filed against ABC, angry investors described how promised renovations never occurred and homes were not rented. Other transactions were fabricated entirely. Hundreds of investors say they were defrauded of millions of dollars, with lawsuits calling the operation a Ponzi scheme.

ABC Capital filed for bankruptcy in 2022 as its legal woes mounted; the case was discharged in 2024, with the company judged to have no assets.

Walsh has blamed a variety of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic and unforeseen challenges in the real estate market.

Now living in Aruba and dispensing real estate advice over social media, Walsh appeared in person in Baltimore County Circuit Court on Thursday morning for a contempt of court hearing in a related matter. He said he was unaware of the new lawsuit and its claims, and declined further comment.

Vignarajah, a former federal prosecutor and deputy state attorney general, previously won a $5.6 million judgment against Walsh in Baltimore County for a Turkish businessman who said he was defrauded. In that case, investors wired money for properties only to find out they had been sold to others instead.

“This second and separate complaint concerns the remaining seventeen properties that were sham conveyances as well as the 44 properties for which renovation funds were misappropriated,” Vignarajah wrote in the complaint.

The lawsuit names two former ABC Capital employees in addition to Walsh: Patrick Coxe, of New Jersey, and Kevin Dunlap, of Cockeysville. Neither could be reached for comment.

“I’m not even going to mention what kind of hack job signature this is,” Dunlap wrote in one exchange, according to the lawsuit. “Who fake[d] this one they need some lessons.”

According to court documents, Coxe wrote to Walsh in December 2022 that he was struggling to find ways to create new bogus email accounts. In the lawsuit, Vignarajah says the accounts were used to impersonate clients in communications with title companies and others.

“I keep running out,” Coxe wrote. “I can’t keep making emails and I can’t even get a new number on an app cause they know its not like a SIM card number.”

The plaintiffs also obtained voice memos Walsh sent as he was dealing with the fallout.

On an audio file attached as evidence, he can be heard lamenting how one title company owner “just asks too many questions; like he wants to talk directly to the buyer. So I just need to move [the money] somewhere else.”