Patricia Clemons had a serious heart condition and she was living on a $1,094-a-month disability check when she answered a letter from a Florida mortgage broker in 2004. It promised what sounded like easy money and cash-back refinancing of her small home in St. Petersburg.

Financial planners warn against taking home loans whose monthly payments exceed 40 percent of income. Yet Clemons, 62, later learned that she’d signed up for a new loan whose costs exceeded 62 percent of her fixed income. To her horror, the loan from Advanced Funding didn’t even have an escrow account to include taxes and insurance in her monthly payment.

“When it came in the mail, it was telling me how much my mortgage was . . . and they were saying we can refinance you for this much, and it was only up a few more dollars,” Clemons said.

Weeks later, pressured by a loan officer, she signed the paperwork that began her nightmare. The ad that seemed too good to be true was.

“How did I qualify to pay $688 a month when I could barely pay $500? How could they take me up that far?” she asked in an interview, still angry. Add in insurance and taxes and her new monthly total was $813 - 74 percent of her monthly disability check.

Clemons became a victim of deceptive advertising that relied on bait-and’switch tactics. Fraudulent ads were used to hook many borrowers with weak credit histories such as Clemons.

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