Mortgage Scams Investigated

I've started to school myself on the ins-and-outs of mortgage and refinance scams. I got interested about a year back when I spoke at a state banker's assocation symposium on phishing, and the impression that I got then is that phishing is small potatoes compared to refi scams.

Probably the most authorative site on the subject is BankRate.com, an aggregation portal for pretty much all things having to do with lending. This article from last year covers the basics of the in-person, billboard-driven scam market.

More dramatic, though, is the online angle. Enter the Refi Retaliator, and the principle players, Darren Brothers, aka SpamSlayer, as the hero, and Alex Polyakov, as the villian. Google the names around, and you'll see that the Polyakov Refi scam is reputed to be the largest and most successful in the business.

Any definitive papers on the subject would be appreciated. I may end up writing my own, since there appears to be a scarcity of public knowledge outside the financial industry. The parallels to phishing are obvious, but the money and property involved is typically enormous, and the international angle of the players seems relatively new.