9 Ways To Spot A Rental Scammer

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.