Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi recently authored an expose on the curious case of the “rocket docket,” which he describes as a “super high speed housing court” that is presided over by retired judges who “clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity.”

It’s a passionate — albeit controversial — behind-the-scenes look at how foreclosure cases are handled in Jacksonville, Fla., and possibly elsewhere throughout the nation.

Taibbi paints a “scary” scene that he says goes a little something like this:

“… in reality, it’s the unpaid bills that are incidental and the lost paperwork that matters. It turns out that underneath that little iceberg tip of exposed evidence lies a fraud so gigantic that it literally cannot be contemplated by our leaders, for fear of admitting that our entire financial system is corrupted to its core — with our great banks and even our government coffers backed not by real wealth but by vast landfills of deceptively generated and essentially worthless mortgage-backed assets. You’ve heard of Too Big to Fail — the foreclosure crisis is Too Big for Fraud. Think of the Bernie Madoff scam, only replicated tens of thousands of times over, infecting every corner of the financial universe. The underlying crime is so pervasive, we simply can’t admit to it — and so we are working feverishly to rubber-stamp the problem away, in sordid little backrooms in cities like Jacksonville, behind doors that shouldn’t be, but often are, closed. And that’s just the economic side of the story. The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis — and, of course, in capitalism we’re not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let’s mention it anyway — shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence. The monster in the foreclosure crisis has no face and no brain. The mortgages that are being foreclosed upon have no real owners. The lawyers bringing the cases to evict the humans have no real clients. It is complete and absolute legal and economic chaos. No single limb of this vast man-­eating thing knows what the other is doing, which makes it nearly impossible to combat — and scary as hell to watch…. At worst, these ordinary homeowners were stupid or uninformed — while the banks that lent them the money are guilty of committing a baldfaced crime on a grand scale. These banks robbed investors and conned homeowners, blew themselves up chasing the fraud, then begged the taxpayers to bail them out.”

To read Taibbi’s entire account of the rocket docket “scam” click here.

Los Angeles Times has three solid recommendations in an article today entitled, “Beware of foreclosure prevention scams.”

Here are the key points:

1. If the company claims to be able to guarantee success in preventing foreclosure, no matter what your financial situation or mortgage details, don’t listen further to the pitch. Nobody can guarantee you’ll get a loan modification, and nobody can guarantee that your lender won’t pull the plug and foreclose.
2. Although there is no federal law against collection of upfront fees for loan modification assistance — unlike so-called credit repair operations, through which fees are prohibited until services are completed — any company asking for $1,000 to $4,000 in advance should be checked out thoroughly by the homeowner before any payment.
3. Mortgage modification companies that claim to have special inside connections allowing them to make your payments directly to your lender — provided you send your monthly checks to the modification company, not to your regular servicer — are almost certainly intent on one thing: cashing as many of your checks as possible, pocketing the money and leaving you unprotected and heading for foreclosure.

As of April 6, 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating about 2,100 mortgage fraud cases throughout the nation — a 400 percent increase from five years ago.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore the options of a possible loan modification with your lender. Just be careful.

And try not to pay any upfront money to a third-party company with an official-sounding name when you may not have to. Especially because there are free government programs such as “Making Home Affordable” that offer housing counselors and other helpful support at no cost.

To check and see if you are eligible for a loan modification use this self-assessment tool right here.