In Ohio, Representative Betty Sutton calls her Republican rival, Tom Ganley, a “dishonest used-car salesman” who has been sued more than 400 times for fraud, discrimination, lying to customers about repairs, overcharging them and endangering their safety. She warns voters, “You’ve heard the old saying, buyer beware!”

In Arizona, Representative Harry E. Mitchell accused his opponent David Schweikert of being “a predatory real estate speculator who snatched up nearly 300 foreclosed homes, been cited for neglect and evicted a homeowner on the verge of saving his house, just to make a buck.”

In New York, Representative Michael Arcuri introduces his Republican challenger, Richard Hanna, as a millionaire who “got rich while his construction company overcharged taxpayers thousands, was sued three times for injuries caused by faulty construction and was cited 12 times for health and safety violations.”

But others, like Time’s Mark Halperin, are noting that some GOP candidates for whom it seems like their previous careers — working at Lehman Brothers, drawing up budgets under the Bush Administration — would paint targets on their backs, are cruising towards strong leads despite the efforts of Democrats to point out their complicity in the financial collapse:

In Ohio, the ex–Lehman Brothers executive (and former long-term Republican Congressman) John Kasich has opened up a comfortable lead over the incumbent Democratic governor Ted Strickland. Also in the Buckeye State, Rob Portman, who headed both the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in the last Bush Administration, is considered by even most Democratic strategists to be a lock to win an open Senate seat and beat the state’s lieutenant governor Lee Fisher. Ohio voters have been told over and over again, on radio and television, flyers and blast e-mails, about how rich Kasich got in the era of Wall Street plunder, and how Portman contributed to George W. Bush’s record of deficits and the blight of American jobs shipped overseas. But those messages have bounced off like popgun caps rather than pierced like silver bullets.

The same can be said of Florida GOP governor candidate Rick Scott, whose company defrauded the government by submitting false Medicare claims, and Pennsylvania Senate candidate Pat Toomey, who worked in derivatives on Wall Street and later proposed placing seniors’ social security payments in privatized personal savings accounts. But the comfortable leads enjoyed by the GOP candidates in question seem less like a function of backlash from Democratic attack ads and more like an expression of frustration with sitting members of Congress and of support for their opponents, whatever baggage they might carry.

In the broad battle of ideas over the state of the economy, it appears that the GOP has successfully steered concerns away from corporate excess and malfeasance and towards government spending. Going negative gives Democrats a chance to define their opponents as people apart from such broad narratives that they likely feel powerless to change at this point. It might not be the complete answer, but it hardly seems like the source of their woes.

It turns out, however, that some just went right back into their old line of business, sort of. The New York Times reports that former subprime lenders are making a killing by running loan modification companies that — surprise! — rip people off instead of reworking their mortgages.

From the ninth floor of a downtown office building on Wilshire Boulevard, Jack Soussana delivered staggering numbers of mortgages to homeowners during the real estate boom, amassing a fortune.

By Mr. Soussana’s own account, his customers fared less happily. He specialized in the exotic mortgages that have proved most prone to sliding into foreclosure, leaving many now scrambling to save their homes.

Yet the dangers assailing Mr. Soussana’s clients have yielded fresh business for him: Late last year, he and his team — ensconced in the same office where they used to broker mortgages — began working for a loan modification company. For fees reaching $3,495, with most of the money collected upfront, they promised to negotiate with lenders to lower payments on the now-delinquent mortgages they and their counterparts had sprinkled liberally across Southern California.

“We just changed the script and changed the product we were selling,” said Mr. Soussana, who ran the Los Angeles sales office of Federal Loan Modification Law Center. The new script: You got a raw deal, and “Now, we’re able to help you out because we understand your lender.”

Mr. Soussana’s partners at FedMod, as the company is known, were also products of the formerly lucrative world of high-risk lending. The managing partner, Nabile Anz, known as Bill, previously co-owned Mortgage Link, a California subprime lender, now defunct, that once sold $30 million worth of loans a month.

Jeffrey Broughton, one of FedMod’s initial partners, served as director of business development at Pacific First Mortgage, a lender that extended so-called Alt-A mortgages for borrowers with tarnished credit for Countrywide Financial, which lost billions of dollars on bad mortgages before being rescued in an acquisition.

The only problem here is that these financial geniuses aren’t exactly delivering on their loan modification promises, according to The Times.

Despite making promises of relief to homeowners desperate to keep their homes, FedMod and other profit making loan modification firms often fail to deliver, according to a New York Times investigation based on interviews with scores of former employees and customers, more than 650 complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau, and documents filed by the Federal Trade Commission in a lawsuit against the company.

The suit, filed in California federal court, asserts that FedMod frequently exaggerated its rates of success, advised clients to stop making their mortgage payments, did little or nothing to modify loans and failed to promptly refund fees. The suit seeks an end to FedMod’s practices, and compensation for customers.

“Our job was to get the money in and then we’re done,” said Paul Pejman, a former sales agent who worked out of FedMod’s two-story headquarters in Irvine, Calif. He recounted his experience, he said, because “I really feel bad.”

“I had people calling me crying, and we were telling them, ‘You can pay me or you can lose your house,’ ” Mr. Pejman said. “People were giving me every dime they had, opening credit cards. But I never saw one client come out of it with a successful loan modification.”

No surprise here.

Mark Thoma at Economist’s View has the best take on all of this:

See, the anti-regulation types are right. A Consumer Financial Protection Agency might stifle valuable innovation like this and prevent these companies from giving consumers the value that they pay for.

I might have that backwards.

Yes, how elitist to suggest consumers should have some protection from these predators. Chalk this one up to yet another lesson not learned from the financial crisis.