Accommodation Scams

Well, as many of you have heard (and most will soon hear), we were unable to move into the apartment arranged for us due to some personal circumstances on the part of the landlord. So I've been looking for accommodation again. Will it never end?

During the last round of accommodation searching I found Gumtree to be very useful, so I put a 'wanted' ad up there again. Last time I had lots of legitimate inquiries, although not always from people who read the ad fully (several inquiries that were too far away, too expensive, or wrong type of accommodation). This time, I had one legitimate inquiry (although the person hadn't read the ad well) and FOUR, yes FOUR scam responses!

We actually got fairly far along with one of the scammers - the name he gave us was 'Antonio Lemma', although I'm sure that wasn't his name. Through a bunch of really poorly-written emails I determined that he claimed to have a rather large place available for really cheap - £410/month for a 2-bedroom house! Now, not living here, you might not realize it, but that is really ridiculously cheap. It was supposedly in the next village over, but even there such a place would probably run closer to £1000/month. Unfortunately, there weren't many properties advertised in this village, so I didn't have much of a sample to compare to or I might have realized how absurd the price was. So, first caution: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

So I tell him we're interested. He wants us to prove we have enough cash to pay the deposit and first months rent, and asks us to demonstrate this by sending him a copy of a Money Gram receipt for that amount - sent from one of us to the other (e.g., from me to Aaron). Now, if you haven't heard of Money Gram, it's basically the same as Western Union - it's a way to transfer money from one person to another. You have to pay cash on one end, and then 10 minutes later a person on the other end can pick up cash from a corresponding location (for example, in Britain you can send money this way through post office branches). So, given that you have to pay cash to send the money, it didn't seem too unusual that he would ask us to get one. However, the things aren't free, and we were disinclined to pay money just to prove we had money. So we asked if we could just send him a copy of a bank statement with important information blacked out. He said no, he insisted on the Money Gram. So we told him we'd go and get the Money Gram the next day.

There were a couple things that were already rubbing me wrong with this guy. I had to ask twice before he responded about the tenancy agreement he would use - and then it was just to say his mother was going to get it worked out with her lawyer and he'd bring it when he came to Cambridge (I had asked for an electronic copy to review ahead of time). He didn't ever mention the cat - I mentioned quite clearly in my wanted ad that we have a cat, and asked him about it specifically, and he didn't ever answer or make any mention of her. This made me particularly nervous because the pictures he sent of 'his' house showed a home that was REALLY well decorated - not a place anyone in his right mind would allow someone else's cat to live in! I asked about average utility cost and he never answered. All in all, he was only focused on getting us to send him the Money Gram receipt so he could set up a viewing and didn't seem at all concerned about any of the details that a real landlord should have been concerned about.

After I told him we'd get the Money Gram receipt, things started getting even more strange. He responded that I should make sure and do it asap the next day so he could solidify his travel arrangements (he claimed to live in London and would not come up to show us the apartment until we proved we had enough money to be seriously interested in it). We went to get the Money Gram the next day, to find out it would cost £46 for the amount we needed. This was completely ridiculous, we thought, so we decided he would need to take the bank statement or nothing. However, I was really anxious about the whole thing, so I first sent an email to the Graduate Tutorial Administrator for my College (a really nice & helpful lady) asking her advice. In the meantime, I started researching the Gumtree forums on scams. The Graduate Tutorial Adminstrator got back to me promptly and said she thought it looked fishy. In addition, I found this forum entry, which pretty much mirrored our situation. Turns out you can pick up money from Money Gram and the like without a real id - you just need the number off the receipt. Fortunately I read all that before we did anything damaging! I blocked his email immediately and reported him to Gumtree and Yahoo - of course, since it was probably a fake name and email, I doubt there's much they could do about it, but that's all I could do.

On top of that, I got an email from a 'Rev. Paul' whose family had just won the lottery and moved to Australia, so he was trying to rent out his properties fast...yeah, that's believable... Also got two more who first approached me like this Antonio guy - giving no description of the flat in the initial communication, having a ridiculous amount of spelling and grammar errors, and on subsequent communications getting very urgent about the timeline and overrating my interest in their properties. Actually, that was just the third guy...a fourth guy emailed me and I figured out from the first email (no description & bad grammar/spelling) that it was a scam. Absolutely unreal.

So, moral of the story: be careful! There are scammers everywhere nowadays...