Greg's Corner

Scammers tell renters to break the window if no one’s home

Steamboat Springs in Colorado is a popular ski resort town. Any popular tourist hotspot will have its fair share of rental scammers and Steamboat Springs is no exception. An attorney was looking for a long term rental in Steamboat Springs and says that she encountered at least four scammers were trying to rent her a property that they didn’t actually own. One scammer is even said to have told the attorney that she could go look at the home herself and if the door was locked she could just break a window. That may just be the biggest red flag for a rental scam we’ve ever heard of.

After that encounter, the attorney started doing research on the property she was hoping to rent and found out that the home was actually for sale and not for rent. Scammers had copied the ad from the legitimate realtor’s website and pasted the ad on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and Zillow. If the attorney had not done her due diligence she may have found herself out of thousands of dollars paid to phony landlords for phony deposits.

The attorney also gave some good advice on how to help sniff out a rental scammer. She recommends asking questions that only locals may know like what school did they send their kids too or things like that. Often these rental scammers will be based overseas and know very little about the local area.

Please remember that if a prospective landlord tells you that you can’t see the property or need to break the window to see it, you’re probably talking to a scammer. We always recommend doing a reverse image search to see how many ads the pictures of the home appear in. If most of the ads say that the home is for rent but one says it’s for sale then the rental ads are more than likely scams. Lastly, you can always check with the county assessor’s office or website to see who the actual owner of the property is before handing over any money.

While this kind of research can be time-consuming it’s worth it to put in the effort in order to avoid being scammed.