Calamities tend to bring out the best and worst in people.

This reality has never been more apparent than in the ongoing mortgage industry meltdown. Thousands of distressed homeowners, desperate for someone – anyone – to help them through their financial hardships sometimes are turning to the unregulated frontier of the Internet for that help. Waiting for them like spiders in a vast web can be legions of con artists – all too aware that the sheer scope of the crisis makes them unlikely to be caught. Type the words “homeowner assistance” in a search engine and up pops hundreds of hits from outfits with official-sounding names, luring unsuspecting victims in with wild promises designed to be too good to resist.

“It's another spin on the same problem we've seen in the housing industry in the last few years,” says Michelle Williams Court, director of litigation for Los Angeles-based Bet Tzedek Legal Services, which provides free legal assistance to stricken homeowners. “There are always people who are willing to take advantage of those in distress or unsophisticated enough to know how to evaluate the offers being presented to them. Because of the collapse of the subprime market, there's been an avalanche of programs and companies to evaluate.”

The advice Williams Court and other industry experts have for people to protect themselves is invariably the same: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But no matter how strenuously the experts urge beleaguered homeowners to keep their wits about them, it doesn't change the reality that homeowners need help. Where, then, can you turn when you desperately need a helping hand but can't risk having your pockets picked?

Perhaps the most reliable source of homeowner assistance is FHASecure, a Federal Housing Administration program created by executive order on Aug. 31, 2007. A division of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, FHASecure provides homeowners with non-FHA-insured, adjustable-rate mortgages – regardless of reset or delinquency status, the ability to refinance into an FHA mortgage. In most cases, the participants' mortgage payments after refinancing through FHASecure is equal or close to their payments before their mortgages reset.

According to Bill Glavin, HUD special assistant to the federal housing commissioner, the FHA Secure program is expected to have assisted 500,000 homeowners secure FHA-refinanced loans by the year’s end.

“For the first time ever, we actually will allow borrowers who are delinquent to refinance through FHASecure,” says Glavin. “There are certain conditions as far as delinquency goes, but we basically say that if you're delinquent because of a mortgage reset, then you can refinance through us. The large majority of those people we've already helped were current on their mortgages. We believe that the great majority of those people would have gone delinquent, but we were able to get to them on time.”

The program isn't for everyone: Glavin quickly points out that potential borrowers still need to have 3-percent equity in their homes in order to qualify for a loan. But the program gives lenders astonishingly flexibility on debt-to-income ratios (“We like the mortgage to be no more than 31 percent of total income, and the total be no more than 43%, but lenders can go beyond that if they feel really comfortable with the borrower,” Glavin says).

Moreover, Glavin adds, the program has just been expanded to cover borrowers with one 90-day delinquency on their record or three 30-day delinquencies.

Another benefit of is that participants will know they're involved in a legitimate program.

“FHA is an insurance company that's been around since 1974, and it's always been in the black,” Glavin says. “Some might say that the program relaxes the rules too much, but we're hearing more of the opposite viewpoint – that we haven't gone far enough. Under the new FHA mortgage, you get people who are credit-worthy on a safe product – a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage at pretty close to the conventional rate, and they're paying on average about $400 a month lower than they were paying under the reset.”

Glavin acknowledged the woeful increase in fraudulent or fly-by-night companies preying upon distressed homeowners, and suggested that many of the operators of these outfits may themselves be driven by a sense of desperation.

“So many companies that engaged in reckless lending have gone out of business,” he says. “So there are a lot of people out there that, now that the sub-prime market has collapsed, are looking for ways to stay in business. People should be, if not wary, very prudent if they get solicitation.”

One step a homeowner can take to guard against unwholesome lenders is to check to see if the company is FHA-approved, Glavin says.

“Companies have to prove to us that they have the wherewithal and knowledge to provide FHA loans,” he says. “If they've been given that OK from us, that doesn't necessarily insure they're an outstanding firm – there are lenders that do things we don't like. But on the whole, if they're an FHA lender, they passed muster with us.”

To find out whether a company is an FHA lender, or to learn more about FHASecure, call 1.800.CALLFHA, or visit the agency's Web site at www.fha.gov.