There’s a grim new twist to the wave of foreclosures ripping through Boston’s poorest neighborhoods.

It’s called the “rescue scam.”

Hundreds of home and condo owners in Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan and Hyde Park are faced with losing their homes to foreclosure after signing on with high-interest-rate lenders.

Now, a cottage industry of shady small-time speculators has sprung up to target these struggling homeowners, neighborhood activists report.

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On March 1, a Wall Street analyst at Bear Stearns wrote an upbeat report on a company that specializes in making mortgages to cash-poor homebuyers. The company, New Century Financial, had already disclosed that a growing number of borrowers were defaulting, and its stock, at around $15, had lost half its value in three weeks.

What happened next seems all too familiar to investors who bought technology stocks in 2000 at the breathless urging of Wall Street analysts. Last week, New Century said it would stop making loans and needed emergency financing to survive. The stock collapsed to $3.21.

The analyst’s untimely call, coupled with a failure among other Wall Street institutions to identify problems in the home mortgage market, isn’t the only familiar ring to investors who watched the technology stock bubble burst precisely seven years ago.

Now, as then, Wall Street firms and entrepreneurs made fortunes issuing questionable securities, in this case pools of home loans taken out by risky borrowers. Now, as then, bullish stock and credit analysts for some of those same Wall Street firms, which profited in the underwriting and rating of those investments, lulled investors with upbeat pronouncements even as loan defaults ballooned. Now, as then, regulators stood by as the mania churned, fed by lax standards and anything-goes lending.

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Mar. 7–It’s scary to think that your retirement or the kids’ college fund can be hurt by a mortgage company lending money to somebody who, it turns out, can’t afford the payments.

But that can happen in today’s economy, where overzealous sub-prime lenders can trigger foreclosures, worsen the slumping housing market, discourage consumers, cause an economic slowdown and roil the stock market.

That spiraling scenario hasn’t happened yet, exactly, but you know how these things go: One day there’s negative news about sub-prime lender New Century Financial, which took place this week, and the next minute your mutual funds are going backward.

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