SAN FRANCISCO — In early 2008, Cheryl Ann Montero, a California mortgage broker, held free seminars in the clubhouse of the Lone Tree Golf Course, in a suburban area near San Francisco. The attendees, homeowners facing foreclosure, were desperate for a rescue from their woes. Using a PowerPoint presentation, Montero delivered one.

She said her firm, Freedom Financial Solutions, could pressure lenders to stop foreclosures by challenging the legality of loan agreements, according to court records. Her fee: $2,500 up front and a $2,000 monthly payment to cover legal costs. "All the real estate agents knew about her classes," says Kay Trail, a Realtor in Antioch. "She was one shrewd sister."

She was also ripping people off, says Ken McCormick, a prosecutor in the Contra Costa County district attorney's office. A player in a new confidence game exploiting soaring defaults, Montero didn't have a team of attorneys to confront lenders. Instead, her firm took a small ownership stake in some of her clients' houses and filed for bankruptcy, temporarily suspending foreclosure proceedings on those homes, according to prosecutors.

In the end, she didn't deliver lower mortgages for the 10 homeowners who paid a total of $52,000 for her services, McCormick says.

"She couldn't make it in real estate anymore, so she just changed hats," McCormick says. "But she was taking money and doing nothing."

The prosecutor charged Montero with 36 counts of grand theft in December. She pleaded not guilty and is free on $100,000 bail.

Rescue scams are springing up across the U.S., exacerbating a housing crisis in its third year. The predators are convincing troubled borrowers they can intervene with their lenders and negotiate lower payments on their mortgages, law enforcement officials say. Instead, the players, often out-of-work real estate professionals who peddled subprime mortgages during the boom, pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars in advance fees and disappear or bleed their victims with monthly fees.

"There's just been an explosion of vulnerable homeowners and people preying on them," says Terry Goddard, the attorney general of Arizona, which recorded the third-highest residential foreclosure rate in 2008, behind Florida and Nevada. "People miss their payments, and they are about to be repossessed, and someone walks in the door and says, 'I'm here to help.' You just can't underestimate the power of desperation."

The swindlers are thriving largely because the lenders and Wall Street banks that inflated the housing bubble with subprime loans have been slow to help homeowners as those mortgages blow up.

"Many victims have made attempts to work with lenders, and they've been frustrated," California deputy attorney general Angela Rosenau says. "That's why these scams are so successful."

President Obama is trying to coax banks to rewrite mortgages with a $75 billion plan that could aid 4 million borrowers. If the lender reduces payments to 31 percent of a borrower's monthly gross income, the government will pick up half the losses.

But mortgage service companies often can't reduce home loans because they've been packaged and sold to investors who expect a steady stream of income. Countrywide Financial Corp., acquired by Bank of America Corp. in 2008 as the housing market was collapsing, sold almost all of the loans it originated to investors and services them for fees, says Scott Kurzan, head of mortgage investor relations there. In many instances, Countrywide is barred by contracts from changing loan terms without investor approval, he says.

If incentives don't get lenders to reduce mortgages, Obama supports the so-called cram-down measure, which has passed in the U.S. House, that allows bankruptcy courts to lower the balance due on mortgages.

Money managers who specialize in mortgage-backed securities say that allowing courts to alter mortgages will scare away investors and drive up the costs of home loans.

As the debate swirls in Washington, self-styled mortgage rescue specialists are flooding homeowners with offers of salvation.

The FBI formed a team in December to investigate such cases.

"A number of them (perpetrators) previously worked in subprime mortgage companies," says Travis Yarbrough, who leads the unit in Washington. "Some of these perpetrators have gotten very creative at separating homeowners from their money."