‘Short selling’ Vegas real estate: Isn’t this a crime?

Since hardly anyone reads Time Magazine anymore, I draw your attention this morning to a piece on Las Vegas from last Friday. It's a Joel Stein snark-a-thon kicking Las Vegas while it's down on its luck. Las Vegas is a big city now. We can take this kind of ribbing. But the part that caught my eye was the part of the story that outlines short selling with the intent to default.

Stein rifs on Brooke Boemio, a real estate agent, who specializes in short selling: "Boemio specializes in short selling, in a particularly Vegas way. Basically, she finds clients who owe more on their house than the house is worth (and that's about 60% of homeowners in Las Vegas) and sells them a new house similar to the one they've been living in at half the price they paid for their old house. Then she tells them to stop paying the mortgage on their old place until the bank becomes so fed up that it's willing to let the owner sell the house at a huge loss rather than dragging everyone through foreclosure. Since that takes about nine months, many of the owners even rent out their old house in the interim, pocketing a profit."

There's only one problem with that. It's a crime, or at least that's how it looks to me.

Am I wrong on this? I'll bet I'm not the only one wondering.