Greg's Corner

Denver man takes on rental scammers

If you’re looking for a property to rent online, and you come in contact with an obvious scammer, we don’t recommend engaging with them. Any actual information they can get out of you can be used for their gain. Instead, if you really want to help prevent the activity of these scammers, we recommend contacting the Internet Crime Complaint Center. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate someone who wastes a scammer’s time in the same way they like to waste ours. A man in Denver was looking for an apartment on a certain disreputable classifieds site when he was contacted by a slew of scammers. Here’s how the rental scam usually works.

In Denver, the scammers kept asking the man for a picture of a check written out for a phony deposit. The Denver man kept sending the scammers e-mails with no attachments, links to URLs that went nowhere, and a picture of broken image error message. It was a number of back and forth e-mails before the scammers realized they were being trolled.

While this man recognized the red flags that led him to realize there were scammers afoot, not everyone does. Just as a reminder, if a rental price sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If a ‘landlord’ wants you to send money without letting you view the property, it’s probably a scam. If they ask you to wire money to them or send money using prepaid credit cards or gift cards, it’s most definitely a scam. Education is the key. If more people are aware of these scams, less people will fall for them and that will begin to drive the scammers out of business.