"With the rapid rise and fall of the housing market, Illinois has seen tremendous growth in the number of mortgage rescue services being offered to consumers who are delinquent on their mortgage payments and/or are at risk of foreclosure. Unfortunately, fraudsters have used these services to cheat consumers out of money and ownership and equity in their home," Jennifer D. Franklin of SIU School of Law writes in her excellent article on the Mortgage Rescue Fraud Act. The piece appears in the latest ISBA Commercial Banking, Collections, and Bankruptcy newsletter.

What kind of scams? Well, there's the consultant scam, where "for a large upfront fee the distressed property 'consultant' promises to buy time for the consumer and save the home by negotiating deals with their lenders," Franklin writes. These so-called consultants "often take the consumer’s money and fail to perform any services, thus leaving the consumer worse off then before."

The article offers great advice about how to use the Act to help your consumer clients recover from fraud perpetrators. Read it.