You see the Day-Glo signs everywhere these days: We buy houses! Cash for your home! Fast refi now!

Chances are, you mentally filed these come-ons under good old-fashioned American entrepreneurship in action. Maybe you even think kindly toward companies that would offer a hand to debt-ridden homeowners on the brink of foreclosure.

Fat chance. The majority of these so-called foreclosure "rescuers" are actually sleazy predators, says Harvard Law School professor and bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren. She calls what they offer "the cement life jacket."

Before you're even aware of it, these scam artists will have acquired your home for a fraction of what it would have brought at sale. Or, in an even worse scenario, they will have transferred your title into a trust that then enables them to rent or "resell" your property to equally hoodwinked buyers while, to your surprise, you remain legally obligated to make the mortgage payments!

Foreclosure "rescue" scams are nothing new.

"In 1929, you could borrow money to buy stock, and then use that stock to buy more stock. At that point, the stock market became overinflated and it crashed," she says. "Much of the same thing is going on now, only instead of stocks, it's home equity."

Take a closer look at these foreclosure "rescuers" and you'll soon see those Day-Glo come-ons for what they really are: the hangover after the real estate party ended.

What the sharks smell
Like sharks and blood, scam artists always smell money. And in America, we've been pouring our money into our homes since the tech-stock collapse gave us a renewed awareness of our risk tolerance. Homes were safe. Homes were real. And, partly fueled by this renewed demand, real estate suddenly became the investment of choice for stock-weary working folks, making them vulnerable to scams and scam artists.

Financial institutions capitalized on the sea change by loosening credit. You can buy a home, maybe two. Can you really afford not to? And, just so you can continue to live the lifestyle you've become accustomed to, they offered an unprecedented number of ways to strip that equity through lines of credit, home equity loans and cash-out refis. The Fed cooperated by keeping interest rates at historic lows.

Our homes suddenly started to look like, well, stocks -- with one big catch.

"All you're doing when you take out a second mortgage on your house is borrowing more money," says Warren. "If you take out equity, it isn't like selling off part of your stock portfolio. You can't sell off two of your bedrooms. You can't say, 'Boy, this market is at its peak, let's sell the backyard.'"

Welcome to what Warren calls "the middle-class squeeze." Rising costs of health care, housing and education, combined with increased job uncertainty, income volatility and eroding salary levels, have placed America's piggy banks -- its homes -- at financial risk like never before.

According to Warren, recent events have made it even clearer that the real estate market was over-inflated and fueled by speculation. "It is also clear that while a lot of speculators will be burned, many homeowners will be hurt as well," she says.