New data suggests that mortgage fraud – which got tougher to scam consumers after the collapse of the U.S. real estate market is returning in a big way.

Data prepared for The Wall Street Journal by research firm CoreLogic, examining about seven million home loans made by hundreds of lenders, show that losses from mortgage fraud, ranging from falsified credit reports to identity theft—rose 17% last year after declining 57% in the 2 years after the peak in 2006.

In 2009, $14 billion in loans, or about 0.7% of all mortgage loans made in the U.S., were originated with fraudulent application data.

CoreLogic, which tracks fraud only by mortgage value, examines about 7 million loans each year using a proprietary computer software program that detects discrepancies in loan documents and predicts the likelihood of fraud. The real losses to banks won’t be known for several years when banks are forced to write off the value of the loans’ value.

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