The Out of Town Landlord Scam

This is one of the most common and believe it or not effective scams being used in almost all over the internet housing sites, from Craigslist to Zillow. So what is the idea behind it and how does it work?

The scam works when you contact the landlord to rent a property and you get a response from someone who is claiming to be the owner or acting on the behalf of the owner of that property. So clearly we are not talking about apartment complexes or properties being rented by real estate agents or management companies. These can very easily be verified by taking a look at companies website, asking for business card, stopping by apartment complex, making calls to company general number and asking for the manger or agent.

On the other hand scammers do not want to be identified and aside from phony email and a probably burner/disposable phone numbers, you have no way of getting hold of them. And when (and you always should) you ask for a meeting or a tour of the property they will give you endless excuses why they cannot do that, and here are few of these excuses:
(1) - I am currently out of town and unable to meet you. But feel free to drive by and take a look from the outside.
(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 or current tenant occupancy.
(3) - If the property is vacant, then the property is "currently being renovated" and I do not want to show it before we are done. Or, I cannot show it for liability (insurance) purposes.
(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 box(like Rently) or a combination lock you might be given the code to. In both cases, that does not verify that the person you are communicating with is really the owner.

In some case you might even be offered assurances like, "the property looks exactly like it is in the pictures", or "I can send you additional pictures if there is something you are looking for in particular". In fact they might even offer to send "someone else" to show you the property. You might be surprised they did so and how, but that is a whole other topic for another post.

The bottom line and the final objective of the scammer is to get you to agree to deal with him/her despite the fact that you never met them or verified their identity. And of course, if you do so, the next logical step is for you to submit and application, pay application fees, send holding deposits, and send first, last and security deposit. And from there on there are so many different potential outcomes none of them is beneficial for you.

The moral of the story is, please do not hand your information or your money to anyone you have not verified beyond "the shadow of scamming" and preferably in the case of private owners, have met face to face and with IDs in hands (yours and theirs). Honest landlord want to get a decent tenant and want to help you avoid scams that give them all bad reputation.

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