Much like dating, searching for a place to live can be the opposite of fun. In love, you’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs. In realty, you’ve got to scroll through a lot of listings. Both, in their own way, pose the risk of catfishing. But at least if you get duped by an embellished Tinder profile, the worst that usually happens is a bad date (which you can get through with the help of a drink or two!)— at end of it all, you get to unmatch, wash your hands of the encounter, and hopefully move on with little to no impact to your day to day. Real estate scams, however, are less innocuous: One bad agreement and you’re homeless with a hole the size of a few grand burned through your wallet.
And the chance that you’re dealing with a real estate scam is higher than you’d think: According to the Better Business Bureau, more than half of rental scam listings go unidentified by Craigslist. Posts marked “suspicious” can stay up on the site for as long as 20 hours.
These pesky scams aren’t going anywhere, says Ori Goldman, CEO and co-founder of Loftey, an NYC-focused moving startup. Goldman also he had one client looking for a New York City apartment from out of town who sent him 20 listings that the client liked, and all 20 were fake.
“Scammers are very good at this, and they’ve been perfecting ways to do it,” Goldman said. “If you’re on a website that allows fake listings and the listing seems too good to be true, there’s a 95% chance that it is.”
Knowing this, the first and foremost tenet of Craigslisting—established by Craigslist itself—is to deal locally, face-to-face. The website suggests following this rule to avoid 99 percent of all scam attempts—but sometimes even before you meet face-to-face some scammy things can pop up. With this in mind, here are seven immediate red flags on Craigslist that can suggest a scam.
from https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/craigslist-scam-red-flags-260563
from waaaay over here —> 7 Things on a Craigslist Listing That Shout “Scam!”
from Sofia Consola
via 7 Things on a Craigslist Listing That Shout "Scam!"
