In Glendale, Calif., three men and two women were arrested and charged with beating, torturing and robbing two self-styled "mortgage modification specialists" in an attack at a real estate office on Oct. 20.

Authorities said the victims, Lamond Dean and Luis Garcia, had taken money from two of their attackers, Mary Ann Parmelee and Daniel Weston, both 52, in return for promising to keep their home out of foreclosure.

But when the couple got tired of excuses and lack of results, they allegedly rounded up help and took matters into their own hands. Police said a handgun and "wooden knuckles" were used in the attack.

Now, I'm not saying I condone what Parmelee, Weston and their accomplices are charged with doing. Nor am I condoning wooden knuckles (like brass, only cheaper, easier to smuggle onto an airplane and slightly less destructive) possession, which is against the law in California.

I'm only saying I understand the impulse.

Since December 2007, when the recession officially started, it's been boom times for scams, cons, frauds, flimflams, hustles, rackets and rip-off artists. They've got Web sites and billboards. They advertise on television and on radio and in the newspaper.

The mortgage modification scam is one of the most popular. A guy — very often the same guy who in 2005 and 2006 was selling subprime mortgages to people who couldn't afford them — will set himself as a mortgage consultant.

He'll send you an official-looking letter — sometimes it will even have your bank's return address on the envelope — or run a television commercial with photos of the White House and footage of President Barack Obama. The promise, implied or explicit, is that the guy will get you into the federal mortgage modification program.

You pay him a couple of thousand bucks up front, or sign some innocent-looking papers, and maybe the guy makes a couple of phone calls. Maybe he does nothing at all. When you go to track him down, unfortunately, he's in a meeting.

How these people sleep at night, I have no idea. A guy with a gun knocks over a 7-Eleven for a couple of hundred bucks, he gets an overworked public defender who maybe pleads him down to five years in prison. A guy with a color printer and a bulk-mail permit can make a thousand times that much, giving him plenty of money for a good lawyer in the unlikely event that he's caught.

I got one of these phony letters myself last week. Unlike a lot of people, I happen to have a job that allows me to call the state attorney general and get him to come to the phone. Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster was one of the first state attorneys general to get on the scams, and he sits on a state-federal task force on the problem.

Koster said that as of last Wednesday, his office had received 191 complaints about mortgage-modification scams this year. That's more than twice the number the attorney general's office handled in 2007 and 2008 combined. So far, Koster's office has filed "seven or eight" cases, with a similar number under review.

The cases are hard to make, particularly in criminal courts, and particularly if you take them federal. The FBI can handle only the biggest of the cases, and it wants evidence that at least $1 million has been bilked, Koster said.

If you want to make a criminal case, money needs to have changed hands and paperwork has to exist documenting what promises were made. The sharpies fuzz up the paperwork. Memories of who said what to whom might be vague when the case finally makes it to court.

You keep it under a million bucks, fuzz up the paperwork and play hard to get, odds are you get away with it. Doug Ommen, who heads Koster's consumer protection division, quoted one federal regulator as saying, "We'll never get through all these leads."

The federal government made it easy for the scammers. The Obama administration's Home Affordable Mortgage Program was painfully slow to ramp up, though this month it announced it was on target for reaching its goal of helping 3 million to 4 million homeowners. So far, it has helped 500,000 families.

When Wall Street needed help in September 2008, it was done in a weekend. When homeowners need help, it takes eight months to ramp up. Some big lenders, who rolled mortgages into pools and sold them in pieces as mortgage-backed securities, now claim it's hard to refinance them because they can't tell who owns them.

Now, says Elizabeth Warren, head of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP funds, there's a new need: help for those who've lost their jobs and discover that their conventional loans aren't eligible for the modification program.

Here's an idea: If bankers are so valuable that banks have to pay them exorbitant bonuses so they won't go somewhere else, use legislative wooden knuckles on them. Tell them they have to work out all the mortgages before they get paid. You can bet it won't take eight months.

Kevin Horrigan is a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.