Scammers target students searching for housing
With summer approaching, many students are searching for housing, and they often turn to listing websites like KSL Classifieds and Craigslist. Some deals are better than others, and some are just too good to be true. That’s because often times, they are.
“[Scams] always seems like a really good deal,” said Ashley Blad, whose husband Allan Blad is a sophomore in undeclared business. “Like, the price of it is significantly lower than a lot of similar-looking houses would be, especially for pet-friendly.”
Ashley said she and Allan have been looking for a new place to live through Craigslist. Occasionally, they find a good-looking place that is located close to campus or downtown Logan that is pet friendly, spacious and cheap, and they email the people who posted the ad.
“We’ll email them and they’ll send this big, long email back about how they’re out of the country or out of the states and they can’t reach you,” Allan said.
In the email, they’ll also mention that they’d originally put the property up for sale, he said, but the realtor wasn’t cooperating with what they were looking for. The scammer asked them not to call the realtor on the for-sale sign in front of the property.
Those are are red flags that indicate the listing is probably a fraud, Ashley said. Another red flag is that scammers will only communicate through email, occasionally through phone, but never in person.
“Usually in the emails, they attach this application-type thing that have kind of personal-type questions that they want you to fill out and send back to them,” Ashley said. “Sometimes they ask for credit checks as well, which is very dangerous.”
The scammers will do what they can to get victim to feel comfortable with them and then ask for the first and last month’s rent, Ashley said.
“So they’ll be like, ‘I can’t meet you, but if you like the place, just send me, you know, 800 bucks and then you can move in on this date,’” Allan said, “and then they just take off with their money.”
Ron Johnson, an associate broker at Coldwell Banker Gold Key Realty, recently discovered one his properties for sale in Logan was being used as a scam.
“All indicators showed me they were probably from Africa somewhere and just making money from people by deceiving them into thinking that the property was their property,” he said.
The people behind the scam had information about the property owners, some middle information and a few pictures of the house, he said. They made up the rest of the information about the interior and used pictures from other houses to make the listing seem more legitimate.
“They simply were looking to get first and last month’s rent out of people,” he said. “They could potentially make $1000 to $5000 dollars off of each person they scammed.”
In order to find out more about them, Johnson contacted them and pretended to be a potential renter with a lot of money from an inheritance but with bad credit from a bad divorce. They were interested in dealing him, but when he insisted on meeting with them they wouldn’t respond, he said.
“They’re playing it very well,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of work over in Africa in the past years as a government agent and there’s a lot of scamming that goes on on that continent, all kinds of little scams. A lot of the scammers are located in Benin and they’ll go to a café and they work at a café all day, because it has Internet, Wi-fi, and they’ll sit there at their computers all day and make money.”
The scams are perpetuated by desperation, he said. Renters who are desperate for housing will overlook spelling and grammar mistakes in emails and the lack of direct communication with the sellers because the listings seem like such a good deal and they want to believe it’s true.
It’s out of desperation for the scammers as well, Johnson said. With poor economies, job opportunities and education in their countries, they are trying to make a living the best way they can.
To identify and avoid scams, Ashley suggests reading the listings carefully and watching for misspelling and bad grammar. Email the person anyway, but watch their response, she said.
If there is a listing that seems too good to be true, flag it so it’s taken down, Allan said. If it’s legitimate, the homeowners will try to get it back up, but if it’s a scam, then it’s likely to fall by the wayside.
Always insist on meeting face to face and contact the realtor’s office or property management company, Johnson said. Don’t depend on pictures and then send them a check expecting to get a key back.
“Use common sense,” Allan said. “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
—miranda.lorenc@gmail.com
@miranda_lorenc