Scammers Are Out-Even in a Bad Economy

With the economy in such shambles, I guess it is only natural for scammers to be and about causing more headaches for everyone. Like we don’t have enough to worry about already. As I have mentioned before, our lease is almost up and we have been looking for a rental. What a pain it has been.

99.9% of the rentals that we inquired about were bogus ads set up by Realtors who tried to show us other properties they had or scam ads. Yup, scam ads. Brilliant little scams that even I almost fell for. Luckily though, I know what to look for and caught it before we got dooped. However, I think this scam is worth mentioning here so others don’t get screwed.

Before I give the scenario, I want to point out that I have always enjoyed using Craigslist to post things for sale, inquire about jobs, and have even bought things from others on there. Lately though, I don’t know what the heck is going on. It seems Craigslist now is a portal for scam artists and people out to screw you in some way or another.

The last few times we have listed things for sale, we got bombarded with emails from people telling us they are sending a friend with a cashiers check…blah blah blah…SCAM!

So since our local paper and flyers aren’t showing too many rentals, we turned to Craiglist. Immediately, I seen a house right down the street from my daughters school. I recognized the house right away because we drive by it every day.

Anyway, the ad listed it for rent for $1200-By Owner and dogs allowed. The only way to contact the person who listed the house was to send an email through Craigslist. I did. No response.

I figured the house rented. I moved on to look for another house. Guess what was re-listed at $1000 a month? Yup, the same house. So I am thinking…SWEET! It is in our price range, close to the schools, they are OK with dogs, the house has a yard.

This time the ad had a full name of the owner, an email address with the owners name in it, and cross streets for the home. Sounds legit.

Maybe my last email went to their spam box? So I emailed from another email address. This time I sent our phone # too.  I wanted this house.

A few hours later we received an email asking if we were still interested in the house. They even gave us the exact address and told us to drive by and see if we liked it. I took it a step further and looked up county records, etc. Just to see if the house is pending foreclosure, etc. Everything looked good. Yes, the name on the ad and email address matched the real owners name.

So we emailed back that we were very interested. He emailed back immediately with a story on why he is renting the house. This email was full of broken English and gave some story about working in the UK under contract for 3 years and…well, it just didn’t make sense and sounded fishy.

Next email we got was a rental application from this guy (or girl…who knows?) asking us every bit of personal info you can imagine. I decided to research this a little more. I wanted that house but something didn’t feel right.

I “Google” the phone # he gave us. Immediately I found someone posted about a UK rental scam going on. They posted the EXACT email info word for word that I got! So right then and there, we knew it was all a hoax.

I wanted to see though why the heck they picked this house in our little area. So I searched the address, and sure enough, the home is on a real estate site for rent and gives the owner info.

So basically these scammers go on sites and steal pictures and listings…whatever they can get, and make bogus ads and email addresses (with the owners names in them to seem more legit) to get people to give out there person info.

I am sure they probably would ask for a deposit wired to them or something but we stopped it right there.

Incredible.

So needless to say, I have a month and we are having no luck. If we stay here month to month, they will charge us hundreds more per month. The least we can renew for is 7 months. Yuck, I can’t stand this place.

My daughters have resorted to calling our apartment complex “gangster’s paradise” and my husband and I are just fed up with the garbage and thugs that are moving in. In the last few months this place has gone even more downhill. The apartment next to us sits vacant and I can only wonder who is going to move in soon. I guess it could always be worse, we could be homeless.

It’s like Forrest Gump says” Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.”

My parting thoughts:

I have since gone on Craigslist just to test my theory and found quite a few scams within the last few hours on there. So for anyone out there looking for a rental, be very careful. Not just on Craigslist but on any website. These scammers might not ask for money upfront but just giving them your personal info is enough to cause you identity theft problems that will take forever to clear up.