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That is the key message of a campaign launched in Massachusetts yesterday to alert homeowners to the rise in loan modification schemes that are now a nationwide epidemic. The Massachusetts campaign urges owners not to pay any money in advance of securing a home refinancing agreement and advises them to use a federally approved loan counselor for refinancing and to report suspected fraud to federal or state authorities.

“Loan modification scams are reaching epidemic proportions across the nation,’’ said Thomas J. Curry, a board member of NeighborWorks America, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit spearheading the nationwide program. “Countless fraudulent companies are making a great deal of money by preying on the fears of worried homeowners.’’

The effort to thwart scams comes as Massachusetts foreclosure activity is mounting. During the first four months of the year, 4,821 homeowners lost their properties, which is a 36.6 percent increase from the same time last year, according to Warren Group, a Boston company that tracks local real estate. Another 9,008 homeowners went into foreclosure during that time.

Grace Ross, a founder of the nonprofit Massachusetts Alliance Against Predatory Lending, praised the new campaign as a much-needed effort to keep financial predators from taking advantage of desperate homeowners. Only a small percentage of people seeking relief from lenders are getting it, she said, and many are not aware of their legal rights.

“The crisis continues with no signs of abating,’’ Ross said of foreclosures in the state.

Barbara Anthony, undersecretary of the state Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation, said officials are working on many fronts to help homeowners, including by hosting workshops to bring lenders and mortgage holders together.

“A seemingly quick fix to a foreclosure can be attractive to families in the midst of a crisis, but homeowners need to be aware of the potential to be scammed,’’ said Anthony. “The quick-and-easy promises of unscrupulous entities offer false hope.’’

Mortgage loan schemes in Massachusetts typically fall into one of three categories, according to the state attorney general’s office.

They include:

• Attempts to dupe homeowners into transferring ownership of their properties to someone else
• Programs that charge hefty fees but provide little or no help
• And for-fee bankruptcy filings that are intended to help an owner keep their house, but are rejected by the courts because of improper paperwork.

Homeowners are urged to avoid anyone who guarantees the can help homeowners in Massachusetts avoid foreclosure and to make sure a counseling agency is approved by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The campaign will feature fliers, public service announcements, and placards on buses. For more information about how to stop foreclosure and report suspected scams, visit www.loanscamalert.org or call 1-888-995-4673.

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So what is the true financial impact of the decision by the state Division of Insurance to reject premium increases for individuals and small businesses, leaving 2009 rates in place for now? The logical places to look for a hint are the quarterly financial reports posted by insurers yesterday.

Those numbers are dramatic and confusing. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts said its operating loss rose to $95 million. Tufts Health Plan reported an operating loss surging to $59 million from $16.5 million during the same period last year. Harvard Pilgrim Health Care’s operating loss jumped fourfold to $28.6 million. The operating loss at Fallon Community Health Plan climbed to $10.8 million from $1.3 million.

A couple of things make those numbers confusing. First, health insurers usually earn investment income on their surplus funds, gains that dampen the impact of operating losses. After accounting for investment income, the net losses at each of the four big Massachusetts insurers were smaller than operating red ink would suggest.

More important, insurers used different accounting methods to measure the current and future impact of the rate dispute.

One example: The $59 million operating loss reported by Tufts included a $40 million provision that represents the impact of the rate dispute on its business through the balance of the year. The actual hit in the first three months of this year was not so severe.

So the numbers paint a confusing picture, but they do make a few important things crystal clear. The state’s big health insurers were in the red a year ago, and they’re still losing money now.

Insurers are convenient villains in the story about soaring health care costs and state regulators certainly put the responsibility for most small business and individual rate increases on them without doing anything about the actual expense of health care.

The consistent, serious losses at insurers should be persuasive evidence the problem is more complicated than the fix suggests.

“The numbers are serious for all the plans,’’ says Jim Roosevelt, president of Tufts Health Plan. “In a very traditional accounting sense, they indicate what happens when you deal with the revenue of a regulated industry and ignore the committed and contracted costs.

“This really should be a story about underlying costs for hospitals, doctors, and prescription drugs and how we make decisions as a Commonwealth and a society on what is the right amount to pay for those. When you do what has happened here and just limit premiums, you produce these kinds of numbers,’’ he says.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. State health officials recently reported on the financial strength of insurance companies and how it had grown, by some important measures, over the past decade. A similar report on financial reserves at the state’s hospitals came out yesterday.

Meanwhile, a new health care bill backed by Senate president Therese Murray is expected to reach the Senate floor this morning. That proposal contains some things insurers like, such as a high-risk reinsurance pool and open enrollment restrictions for individuals. They consider it a big improvement.

Insurers are the health care middlemen people love to hate. Many would like to eliminate them entirely. But chronic insurance losses are evidence of a bigger problem we haven’t come close to solving.

Story courtesy of the Massachusetts Business Directory – MA Local Guide

Moody’s Economy.com of West Chester, Pa., which analyzed employment, production, and housing data, estimates that Massachusetts began a recovery in January, becoming one of 22 states with growing economies. New Hampshire, the only other New England state no longer in recession, began its recovery in December, according to Moody’s Economy.com.

Home sales have risen at double-digit rates from the previous year for four consecutive months, while prices have risen in each of the past two months, according to Warren Group, a Boston company that tracks the real estate market. An improving national economy has helped, too. Yesterday, the Dow Jones industrial average hit a nearly 18-month high, closing at 10,889. The broader Standard and Poor’s 500 index and technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite also rose.

Faucher said the makeup of the Massachusetts economy has helped it emerge from the recession sooner than many other states. The state’s large education and health care sector, which accounts for more than one in five jobs, has grown through the downturn, adding nearly 25,000 jobs since the recession began here in March 2008.

The state has also been bolstered by growing worldwide demand for technology products and increased business spending, said Faucher. Massachusetts has a high concentration of firms that sell goods and services to other businesses.

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