Finally the big guys are coming down. Wall Street tycoons Ralph Cioffi and Mathew Tannin of Bear Stearns, publicly arrested Thursday in New York, are not alleged to be guilty of the kind of mortgage fraud that puts people out of their homes, but rather they are accused of mortgage securities fraud - a misrepresentation to investors of the viability of the hedge funds they managed.

Cioffi also withdrew $2 million of his own money, alleged insider trading nearly 10 times as great at the $230,000 that sent Martha Stewart to jail for five months, house arrest for five months, and two years probation.

For the plain vanilla mortgage fraud, about 400 arrests have been or will be made based on data already collected in "Operation Malicious Mortgage" by an alphabet soup of federal agencies:  the FBI, USPS, IRS, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Trustee Program, HUD, the VA, and the FDIC. One billion hard dollars, $300 billion in failing home loans and trillions of dollars in home equity have been lost, according to Reuters.

The Mortgage Fraud Blog reports that every region of the United States was affected.

What should you do if you have been defrauded? Keep paying your bills while seeking relief. Someone else's crime doesn't let you off. Improve your financial literacy so you're more astute the next time you borrow money or invest. And always read the fine print. Yes, it may take quite a few tries before you understand it, but keep asking questions till you get it, because no one is responsible for your situation but you. Even ignorance does not equal innocence.