Another Rental Craig’s List Scam…with a lot of thought put into it

October 22, 2010

As the rental market continues to grow there is a lot of competition for both good places and good tenants.  The landlords are put in the difficult situation of finding good tenants with not-so-perfect credit histories and the prospective tenants are desperately trying to plead their case and explain their situation while having a nice and secure place to live.

With any market that is in demand, opportunist abound.  I have seen rental ads that offer beautiful homes for out-of-this-world affordable monthly rental prices.  These ads take you through a series of websites until you are on a homepage that requests money to sign-up for the rental showing.  You should never pay money to “see” an apartment. 

The latest scam is for single family rentals.  The ad boasts a single family house for rent and seems to be fairly normal other than the monthly rental price is well below current market rates.  It lacks any pictures or details other than the town, number of bedrooms and the rental price.  There is a delayed response to any information requests via email and no phone number. 

After a day or so…an email comes across with a story about how the owner had to move quickly to take advantage of a land deal overseas and will not be able to show you the house.  It encourages you to do a drive-by of the property and provides an address for you to do so.  The email then states that they can mail you the keys after you provide “some” information about yourself so that they can be secure with who they are renting to if you happen to like the house. 

The email continues on to explain that there is a For Sale sign in front of the house which will be removed after you rent it.  Here’s the kicker…it’s a REAL HOUSE that is REALLY for sale!  If someone at all doubted the legitimacy of the email and did the drive-by, it would all line up.  They wouldn’t even have to drive by; they could just Google the address and it would come up! 

It gets better…

The email that is responding is a yahoo email that matches the name of the Realtor that has the house listed!!  So if the house is listed with me, it would come from amymullen@yahoo.com.  Many email programs let you determine the response email (or display email) and they don’t necessarily need to be valid email addresses. 

So…if you were wary and decided to check out the house and found it all to be as you expected.  And were still wary and decided to continue to respond to this person because it still all appears valid…you will receive another email explaining that they need the security deposit before they can “mail” you the keys to gain entrance.  As far as you know, it’s the Realtor who is emailing you.  They do not ask for a credit check and do not have a person in the area to show you the house.  Then, they have your money and you never receive any keys.

Protect yourself!!  By using a Realtor to find your next rental or list your available rentals, we can reduce the number of scams and hopefully save some people from being victims to them.