Scam Alert: The Rental Racket

Alex Nabaum

Of course, this is too good to be true, I thought as I read the online ad. A two-bedroom, renovated house in downtown Washington for only $1,000 a month? With the city’s notoriously expensive rental rates, this was a steal.

Maybe the neighborhood was rundown, I reasoned, or the owner was desperate to rent quickly. I decided to e-mail the address listed on the ad to find out more.

A few days later, “Rev. James Harrison” replied, saying he was the owner of the house. In an e-mail rife with misspellings and grammatical errors, Harrison explained that he had lived in the house with his family until they left on a missionary trip to Nigeria. He was looking for renters until they returned, and if I was interested, I should be prepared to wire him the first month’s rent—$1,000—via Western Union. “As soon as your payment is confirmed, the house keys and documents would be sent to you,” he wrote.

Alas, my perfect apartment was indeed a steal—another twist on advance-fee theft. (For more on this type of scam, go to Scamorama.com.)

My doubts about “the reverend’s” claims were confirmed with a quick search of online property records. According to D.C.’s database, the owner of the house since 2005 was a woman. Although the owner could not be reached for comment, a neighbor said that the woman owned the house and that a Rev. Harrison had never owned or lived in it.

So I wrote to Harrison again. Could I see the inside of the house before making a commitment? How much did utilities usually cost each month?

“There is no one to show you the flat now,” he replied, ignoring the utilities question. “As soon as you send the payment, my client here in Nigeria would come and show you.”

It was easy enough to spot the Rev. James Harrison--with his dizzyingly ungrammatical email, implausible missionary story and request for foreign wire transfers--as a fraud. But what if the seller had been JoAnn Rinaggio, recently transferred to a job in North Carolina? That was the story behind a similar rental scam in Brooklyn, according to the New York Daily News.

Another New Yorker, Standard & Poor’s economist Beth Ann Bovino, found herself on a different side of this rental fraud. A scammer listed her New York apartment for rent—even using Bovino’s name and address but a fake e-mail account—in an online ad. Bovino realized something was amiss when people called about coming by to see the apartment. Posing as a prospective renter, the real Bovino e-mailed the fake Bovino. The imposter, who said she’d moved to California, wanted Bovino to wire money to prove she was truly interested in the apartment.

Craig Solomon, an Internet fraud expert who operates the Scambusters.org website, says rental scams like these are on the rise, especially in urban areas where people are scrambling for affordable housing. “Scammers are going to prey on this desperation,” he says. “They’re sending out a million messages a month, so they don’t need to hit everybody. It’s the shotgun effect—you shoot a shotgun in the air enough times, you’re going to shoot a bird.”

How can you avoid being that bird? If you know what to look for, fraud can be easy to spot—the Rev. Harrison’s poor grammar and spelling, implausible missionary story from Nigeria and request for wire transfers gave him away. Asking for money upfront or for personal information are big red flags, too. Craigslist.com, a website that carries classified ads, advises doing business only with “local folks” to steer clear of scam attempts.

If you see a suspicious ad, alert the Web administrators (many sites have buttons that allow you to “flag” suspicious ads). If your home is being used as scam bait, tell the website to remove the ad. Then file a complaint with the Internet Crime Complaint Center, at www.ic3.gov/faq, sponsored by the FBI and National White Collar Crime Center.