The law was sparked by hundreds of complaints filed with the state attorney general’s office.

Just last week, Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum’s office announced it had filed a lawsuit against three Miami-Dade County companies charging them with taking part in a foreclosure rescue scam. The companies, identified as Kirkland Young LLC, Attorney Aid LLC and ABK Consultants, allegedly charged up-front and back-end fees. Charging such fees is illegal.

“If your broker asks for any money up front, simply turn and walk away,” said OFR Commissioner Tom Cardwell, in a news release.

The new law has resulted in a deluge of new mortgage broker applications, said OFR spokeswoman Holly Hinson.

Last year, OFR received just 2,037 applications. However, in the last six months alone there have been 5,200 new applications filed, she said.

South Florida ranks fourth in the nation for home loan modifications, with 34,860 through November under President Barack Obama’s Making Home Affordable Program.

Nationwide, 24 percent of the nation’s 3.3 million homes with troubled loans have been modified, according to a U.S. Department of the Treasury report.

In July, the South Florida Business Journal reported Miami-Dade County’s Mortgage Fraud Task Force was handling more than 200 cases of loan modification fraud and that the Miami-Dade office of the FBI had the second-highest number of mortgage fraud reports in the country last year at 5,155.

While the new law isn’t going to eliminate loan modification scams completely, it will make it more difficult, said Steve Dibert who started MFI-Mod Squad, a privately funded loan modification investigative firm in Boynton Beach.

“You want to make it as difficult as possible for that person trying to work around the system. You will always find some crafty criminal to find the weakness and exploit it, but you want to make it as difficult as possible,” he said.