Lorraine Brown of Alpharetta, Ga., was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Henry Lee Adams Jr. after she pleaded guilty Nov. 20 to conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, according to prosecutors. She will also serve two years of supervised release and pay a $15,000 fine.

Brown admitted the six-year scheme was set up to make more money with temporary employees working for less and signing thousands of mortgage-related documents each day. She also said that she and others hid these actions from clients, LPS executives and investigators by testing new employees to make sure they could mimic signatures and lie to auditors and the FBI.

Now … here is the rub.

Lynn Szymoniak, a lawyer who specializes in investigating white-collar crime, tried to refinance the mortgage on her condo in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. When she ended up in foreclosure instead, she started investigating.

What she discovered was a key piece of evidence that helped unveil the “robo-signing” scandal — the fact that major lenders were filing documents in court attesting to their ownership of mortgages signed by people who didn’t even work for them, let alone know anything about the documents they were signing.

Szymoniak shared her findings with others, including “60 Minutes,” and became active in the fight against foreclosure fraud. In response to a claim she filed in South Carolina under the whistleblower provision of the False Claims Act, she will receive $18 million from the $25 billion foreclosure settlement.

The $10 temporary workers … the insiders … were directed to forge documents. If only one of them was aware of the False Claims Act, that person could have easily documented the evidence and would have been awarded $18 million dollars. A low-pay worker had the opportunity to be awarded $18 million dollars and they did nothing.

You see fraud in your company … are you going to do nothing and let someone else collect the reward?

Reporting fraud can make you wealthy.