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Reporting from Washington -- There's anecdotal evidence that an increasing number of homeowners are trying to pull the wool over their lenders' eyes. In some cases, they are lying in an effort to save their homes from foreclosure. But in other instances, they are trying to convince lenders to grant them new, more favorable loans they don't really deserve.

Frank Sillman, managing partner at Fortace, a Los Angeles-based fraud pursuit and recovery company, has seen a marked increase in loan-modification fraud, which could be described as just the opposite of the loan-approval fraud committed by many people to obtain mortgages for which they didn't really qualify.

"First, they overstated their incomes," Sillman says. "Now they are understating them."

In some cases, out-of-work industry insiders who have been sidelined by the housing recession and are no less desperate to generate a little income are coaching borrowers to hoodwink lenders.

Sometimes, in fact, they are being aided by those same supposed professionals who originally told borrowers it was OK to exaggerate their earnings or pass off someone else's sterling credit record as their own. "Crooks morph very quickly," Sillman says.

In other instances, borrowers are winging it, fudging tax returns and altering weekly pay stubs to show lenders they can no longer afford their house payments.

Coaxed or not, though, people who lie to their lenders are just as guilty of a crime as foreclosure-rescue specialists who fleece struggling borrowers out of their last few thousand dollars by promising to negotiate better loan terms and then failing to deliver.

Sillman says he's seeing "a ton of fraud," especially as it applies to fake "short sales," which is the industry term used to describe the sale of a property for less than what is owed on it.

Rather than stay in a home they can no longer afford, or one that is no longer worth what they paid for it, many borrowers can try to prove to their lenders that theirs is a truly a hardship case.

If a borrower can show there's no hope that he can make his payments as originally promised, he can pretty much wipe the slate clean. Uncle Sam forgives the difference between what he owes and the selling price, his loan is closed and, unless he is already behind on his payments, his credit record remains intact.

Lenders generally approve legitimate short sales because it is less expensive than foreclosure. But they want to make sure borrowers who want out honestly no longer have the capacity to meet their obligations. And what investigators are finding is that many applicants can still make their payments, they just would rather not.

Sillman's firm has uncovered numerous questionable short sales in which the "buyer" is really a friend or family member. Typically, lenders would rather see arm's-length transactions in which they buyer and seller do not otherwise know each other. But they will consider a sale to a family member or friend.

Fortace also has uncovered many instances where solvent owners are imploring employers to tell lenders they no longer work there or are temporarily signing over assets to friends or distant relatives. "Everyone's trying to hide assets," Sillman says.

Others have uncovered similar shenanigans. Jeffrey Taylor at Digital Risk, an Orlando, Fla., firm that analyzes loan portfolios on behalf of potential investors, has found numerous cases where co-workers are supposedly verifying income rather than the boss, or where people are claiming they have been told they will be laid off in 30 or 60 days so they qualify as "imminent defaults."

Many owners whom Taylor says "are trying to get their share of the free money, one way or another" are also failing to disclose bank and stock accounts, neither of which are listed on credit reports. "It's easy to hide assets if you don't want to disclose them," says Taylor, whose firm scours numerous databases to root out liars.

Jon Daurio of Kondaur Capital in Orange, a firm that buys nonperforming mortgages for pennies on the dollar and then works with troubled borrowers to get them back on track, has seen a proliferation of "canned" hardship letters borrowers are asked to write to explain why they became so far behind on their payments.

The letters are so similar, reports Daurio, it is obvious that people have been "coached" about what to write. Merle Sharick of the Mortgage Asset Research Institute says this is a growing cottage industry among out-of-work mortgage professionals who are now billing themselves as loan-modification specialists.

In many cases, according to Sharick and other observers, these are the same industry insiders who led borrowers blindly into loans they could not hope to afford, often coaxing them to lie on their loan applications. "Once a crime of opportunity," Sharick says, "fraud is now a crime of necessity."

Lying to purchase a home is known in the business as "fraud for property." Here, borrowers have no evil intention; they just want to get into a house. The other type of loan fraud is known as "fraud for profit," a term used to describe the scams often perpetrated by insiders, sometimes in conjunction with organized crime, to churn huge sums of cash.