Looking for a new home or apartment takes a lot of effort, especially if you don’t currently live in the city where you’re looking for property. Scammers try to take advantage of your stress and confusion.
A rental scam is when somebody poses as a landlord or property owner, and attempts to get money or personal information from people who are interested in their listing. It’s unfortunately common—most people are aware that fake rental postings exist—but awareness isn’t even half the battle.
Scammers make their money by making posts look realistic and trustworthy. To the untrained eye, these scam listings may seem like the real deal. Before you start your search for a new rental property, you need to educate yourself on these scams so that you can identify them and avoid falling victim to one.
Live by these words: Be Skeptical. If it looks so good that it’s hard to believe, then don’t believe it.
Rental scams are present just about everywhere you can find listings. They’re most commonly found on the internet, which is also where most people do their home searching. User-regulated sites like Craigslist are ground zero, but that doesn’t mean major real estate aggregators are completely free of scams.
Fewer and fewer people post listings in print, and scammers are less likely to utilize services that require payment in order to post listings, but believe it or not, scams occasionally occur there as well.
If you’re walking through a neighborhood and you see a “for rent” sign on a property, that’s a little more trustworthy as you know for a fact that the property exists. Scammers will not bait people with a property that they actually own, as tracing the scam back to them is relatively simple in those cases.
Rental scams range from the blatantly obvious to the extremely clever, but the best scammers are always changing their tactics. Here are some of the more commonly used methods.
Copying and Pasting: In order to make a listing look more legitimate, scammers will simply find a real listing, copy it (perhaps slightly altering various details), and repost it as their own. It is fairly common for scammers to lower the price of copied listings.
Posting to Community Sites: It’s easier to post to sites with a less stringent (or non-existent) approval process. Community sites like Craigslist are essentially the hunting grounds for scammers. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use these sites at all, but if you do you need to be wary.
Preying on People’s Emotions: Moving can be an emotional process, sometimes these emotions cause us to make rash decisions. Scammers know this. Many of them develop skills that help them manipulate people’s emotional states. If you’re having a hard time finding a rental property, they’ll step in and pose as your savior. They'll then ask for deposits and rent up front, right then and there.
Former Tenants Posing as Landlords: Sometimes the scammer is actually the former tenant of the apartment in question. That way they are able to provide pictures and detailed information of the apartment. This method is riskier for the scammer, but that doesn’t stop everyone.