Protect Yourself from Rental Scams
NBC Bay Area | A desirable place to live with a competitive rental market creates an attractive place for rental scammers to do business. Scammers take advantage of prospective tenants by setting up fake ads for real properties. Rental scams aren’t new, but technology allows criminals to take the ruse to new levels.
Sometimes a rental scam is as simple as posting an application to gather a prospective tenant’s personal information. In other cases, it’s more involved and designed to collect money and information.
San Francisco sits on all sorts of lists of “dream cities” of places to live. And scammers know it. NBC Bay Area talked to Operation Shamrock’s Erin West about rental scam trends and what to do to avoid them. Although the media often portrays scam victims as older, these scams target younger people who are very accustomed to sending money online, signing contracts online, and moving quickly.
In a recent case, the prospective tenant found an apartment listed on both Craigslist and Zillow, apparently cross-posted by the same person. He contacted the listing agent on Craigslist, attended an open house to tour the building, and submitted a rental application. When he learned he was approved to rent, he signed the contract and wired the rent and deposit. Three days later, when he went to pick up the keys, no one was there, and the agent wasn’t answering his texts.
Protect Yourself: When dealing with a physical piece of property, use face-to-face transactions. Don’t hand over money until you get the keys.
When he went through Zillow to contact the owner, they both discovered the scam. The person impersonating the listing agent had copied the information and images from Zillow, posted them as his own on Craigslist, and used a very similar name to set up the contract and transaction. It’s as easy as cut-and-paste. That three-day gap after wiring the money created the space needed to ensure that the banks wouldn’t be able to recover the funds. If he’d realized the scam within the first 24 hours, he could have called back the wire transfer with the help of law enforcement.
Video and article: Former South Bay DA deputy on how to avoid rental scams
