Some people in our society are not fully equipped to properly evaluate all of the risks that they take (even on a daily basis). When you get into a car, you are placing a lot of trust in the 'professionals' (i.e. the engineers, the safety inspectors, the government regulators, Consumer Reports, etc) that the car is safe, why is a mortgage that much different? To many in our society the inner workings of mortgages (and personal finance in general) are just as transparent as how their car works. You can claim that if they should have educated themselves until you are blue in the face, but (1) we live in a society that doesn't exactly promote/reward that very well, and (2) the mortgage brokers probably pretty heavily tried to convince the consumers that there was no need to even 'shop around' to other brokers let alone spend the time to educate themselves on how their mortgage was going to work (hell, I'm sure some of the mortgage brokers probably didn't even know this; just how to fill out the paperwork to get the mortgage going).