I called up Realtor.com after I got the email above and asked if they had a working relationship with Realtor-outreach.com from India and they said no. I noticed that the URL was just purchased last week.

Is this some sort of scam being run out of India? The only reason they might want to write for me might be links. Any other thoughts what they are trying to accomplish by lying about working for Realtor.com?

I got the email above this morning that I thought I would share. When I first started reading it I felt honored that someone would wnat to write a guest post for me.  But as I read on something didn’t feel right.

Why didn’t they use my name, like “Hi Dave” because my name and photo  is plastered all over my contact page, and who has professional writers in the real estate market? Also why did they said “Real Estate” and not rentals – my site doesn’t sell houses.

Then I looked at where the email came from – India! So SEO companies are outsourcing guest post now to India. Interesting.

I have no idea what the quality of the post would be or if it would be really unique. If I can’t trust that the person from India’s last name is Smith, how am I going to trust that he is providing unique content?

I ran across this funny video called “We Got That B-Roll” and I laughed so hard the first time I saw that I ended up watching it several times and it gave me an idea to copy the format of their video.  Makes me feel better to poke fun at the rental scammers while they normally have me pulling my hair out!

I created this video several days ago and showed it to my wife and she didn’t think it was that funny, so I decided to can it. But my friend Dave saw it later and liked it! So I said to myself, “What the heck, let’s put it out there, maybe someone else might get a laugh out of me acting like a used car salesman.”

Enjoy. If you like it feel free to embed it on your site. Make sure you watch the original B-Roll video – it rocks!

Attribution: Sergio Cilli, Eric Ledgin, Casey Feigh, and Jacob Womack for the video idea (sorry I ‘stole’ some of my favorite lines). The b-roll pictures in the video come from the following Flickr members: Brymo, Lisa Brewster, FaceMePLS, Afiler, Wili Hybrid, Christian Haugen, Ed.Ward. CC BY 2.0

I noticed this job position for rentals.com today. If you read between the lines it means that they are getting hit hard by the rental scammers from Nigeria.

Job Summary:
The Loss Control Representative will be responsible for monitoring and tracking daily Ad Store account activity on Rentals.com and RentalHouses.com. They will be responsible for completing the unauthorized ad check process, documenting and approving/releasing all New User account transactions. They will also monitor, document and assist customers that appear on the Ad Store transaction decline report. This will include assisting customers with ad postings and Level 1 technical support. The Loss Control Representative will additionally research, respond to and document all chargeback requests received from the bank according to the deadlines set by the bank.

After many tweaks to my system the rental scammers have not had any success on my site in the past two weeks. Rentals.com is much larger than my site so I can imagine they are getting hit really hard. Rentals.com must be losing a lot of money in chargeback to hire someone for what I would guess would be a $35k to $40k position.

If anyone from Rentals.com is reading this I am willing to provide you an XML feed of all the known rental scammers that I have detected.

I am guessing that most of the Nigerian rental scammers that visit my site almost daily do not read this blog. Which is a good thing.

I have been having a fun time getting even with them lately for several chargebacks they have cost me this year.

I have developed a bunch of conditional statements that have them running around in circles on my site. I don’t kick them off my site, I like to do  tricky things to them like displaying listings to them that only they can see while capturing all their new techniques and other tactics they are currently using.

They have changed a lot in the past few months. For one thing they do not call themselves doctors anymore.

Won’t it be nice if we could take them all and place them in a bender?

So I just got a chargeback in the mail today. Boy, do I hate chargebacks because they cost me $30 a pop.

If you don’t know what a chargeback is, it’s when someone disputes a charge on their credit card account and are looking for their money back (or the credit card company wants it back). In the process of doing the paperwork for the chargeback the bank takes $30 from my account.

So how do I get chargebacks? 100% of the time it is when a rental scammer steals a credit card from someone and then uses it on my site. The person who had the stolen credit card sees the charge on their account and wants their money back.

On this latest chargeback I noticed all the other places the scammer used the stolen credit card – they are:

• Yahoo Classifieds (3 times)
• Microsoft
• StudentRent (2 times)
• RentClicks – I can’t figure that one out since they are not around anymore
• ActiveRain (most likely from this pro account)

I figured out how this scammer got passed my filters and plugged up that hole, but I am amazed that huge companies like Yahoo and Microsoft are not that well protected.

All the charges happened within a 7 day period. Boy credit card companies are sure slow at detecting stolen cards.

In the past 10 months I have been doing battle with rental scammers almost on a daily basis. This has been somewhat frustrating because takes away from my time building features that would better serve my clients. Over time I have learning a lot on how they think and react to the road blocks I place in front of them. So I thought I would share my knowledge.

Does the price seem to low for the neighborhood?
The scammers love instant gratification, so what they do is place a rental in a hot rental market and then under cut the price almost in half. This will bring in lots of leads for them quickly before their fake ad gets flagged and pulled from the site.

If Google Street View is available do the photos match?
Scammers work in a very random way; this is true when they steal housing images off of other sites. Many times the photo in a fake ad will not be the same as what appears in Google Street View. So it is always smart to check that they match.

Is there a free email being used?
Scammers are cheap and they like to hide behind anonymous email servers. They will use Yahoo, Gmail, HotMail, and many more free email services; they can’t use a custom email domain like scammer@myPropertyManagement.com because people can catch them by looking up the WhoIs record.

Does the rental exist elsewhere with a different address or photos?
Take one random sentence from the listing and place it in Google with quotes and see if you get results back with different addresses or photos.

Is the owner an engineer, chemist or paleontologist?
Before scammers liked to take on the role of a missionary, reverend, or doctor. Several months ago scammers changed their tactic, now they are engineers, chemists, paleontologists, and even gastroenterologists.

Does the owner match the County Assessors Office records?
Scammers are lazy and will not research the county records to see who lives at the address they are running a scam on so make sure you look up the records and it matches who you are talking with.

Is rental description poorly formatted? Scammers like to move fast and they don’t have time to proof read and many are from Nigeria, so watch out for poorly worded and formatted descriptions.

Do the photos seem to be a bit off?
I have seen beautifully decorated ski lodge interior shots for a Miami condo.

Is there a phone number listed on the rental listing?
Most scammers live in Nigeria and they have cell phones registered in the United State (mostly in New York City) and hate to talk with you on the phone with their heavy accent so most will not publish a number or will provide a cell number that will always answer that the person is out of coverage.

If you are interested in finding out if you are dealing with a known rental scammer that I have already dealt with, please try their scam detection quiz.

When trying to track down a Nigerian rental scammer I ran across this bogus profile on ActiveRain:

Then the next day I check his profile and I was that the picture and name changed to this:

He also got more ActiveRain points. I called David Stockert’s office and they confirmed for me that the profile is fraudulent. I checked again just a minute ago and now is age is 46.