When it comes to renting, unfortunately there are a lot of gimmicks and scams out there. The most common one is the "Craiglist landlord", but they are all over the place including websites that claimed "verified source". The objective of these scammers is to get your personal information and/or your money and leave you hanging. So what can one do to protect him/herself from being taken?

Here are couple of ideas that might help you rule out potential scammers and avoid losing your money or identity theft.

The most effective way to prevent the scam is for you to verify the identity of the "landlord". When you contact the "landlord" ask him/her if he is the owner, manger or agent. If they happen to be a professional agent/manager you are in luck. All you have to do is to ask them to send you (email or text) their business card and you can (1) look their company up, (2) find their profile on the company's website, (3)call the company's main line and ask for that individual. And eventually if you get to the final stage of signing a lease or dropping off you deposit and application fee checks, you are going to meet them in their office and 99% of the case that is going to be a legit transaction.

But when dealing with individual owners, things are a big more difficult. Ask the owner for their full name. Take a minute to look the property up on the county's website and verify two things. (1) The property actuall exits and has a legal address, (2) the name of owner matches the name that the "landlord" gave you.

That does not mean that the "landlord" is actually who he/she is claiming to be. As you see the information is public and just like you got the name of the owner, someone else would have too. So now we want to do two things, (1) see the property from the inside, and (2) meet the landlord in person. If you are able to do both, and by both I mean show the landlord your ID and see his/hers when you visit the property, you have eliminated 99% of the scammers.

On the other hand scammers do not want to be identified and when you ask for a meeting or a tour of the property they will give you endless excuses and here are few of them:
(1) - I am currently out of town and unable to meet you.
(2) - If the property is currently occupied, "I do not want to disturb the tenant". Although that might be considerate and true, but most landlord have a clause in the contract allowing them to show the property the last 30 or 60 days. (3) - It is our policy not to show the property till the tenant is out, the property has been turned over (and maintenance and cleaning). This also might be true (99% of the time in case of apartments), but unless the last tenant left it in a disastrous shape, a private owner will show it to you. And in case of an agent/manage the turn over time is few days not weeks. (4) - The property allows for self tour so you can go take a tour and tell me what you think. In this case the property will either have a non-realtor electronic lock (like Rently) or a combination lock you might be given the code to.

Sometimes you will be offered assurance such as "the house looks exactly like in the pictures", or "I can send you some additional pictures if you would like". All of the above are ways to avoid meeting you and avoid identifying themselves.

Now that the "landlord" either convinced you to rent without seeing the inside or got you inside the property, the next step is to get you to send your personal information and then your money. The first is done by "submitting an application". Remember, you are going to hand all your personal information to someone you never met, do not know how they are going to use it or store it. And more importantly you have no accountability and no insight to the integrity of their process.

One example of a potential scenarios here is outrageous application fees, like $100 per applicant. Think that if I can get 5 or 6 people to apply every day that $500+ a day and that is some 15k+ a month. Who needs to rent a house for $2k a month when I can get $15k in application fees for a house that I might not even own! In most cases you will be rejected and if you try to follow up, let us just say "good luck with that".

The scammer might even take this a step further. You will receive an email saying that you have been approved. Now you need to send a holding fee and sign a contract. They will put very stringent constraint on the time limiting your option to wiring the money to them so you do not loose out or renting the house. They will scare you by "we have too many applicants" and "first come first serve", or "we already have 3 back up applications", etc. In fact some might even ask you for first month, last month and deposit right away. We are talking $5-6k here. And once you hit that send button on your wire, it is all she wrote, the scam is complete.

You were communicating with someone from the matrix, he/she did not own the house, there was never an approval and their will never be a retrieval a single dollar that you paid or sent.

I hope this helps you understand one of the many ways that scammers get to steal people's money and not only leave them without shelter but deprive them from much needed sum of money to provide for their families as well. Please use caution and common sense. And the golden rule of life still applies here, "if it sound too good to be true, it probably is".

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