“Sometimes,” said Mr. Malin of Citi Habitats, “you meet someone at a building and they say they’re having trouble getting into the apartment that was in the listing, so they show you something else in the building and they get you all excited about the one you can’t get into, and ask you for cash on the spot without even a credit check or application.”
One of the most widespread and frequently undetected hustles involves collecting nonrefundable application fees from prospective renters.
The grifters “have the keys to a vacant apartment and hold an open house there, not intending to rent to anyone,” said Bob Brooks, an agent at Century 21 NY Metro. “It’s usually a crazy deal, like a one-bedroom on Greenwich Street for $1,750 that should really be $3,100. So they get a hundred application fees because everyone who sees it, wants it. Application fees could be $50 to $250, but I’ve definitely heard of clients giving $500, or $1,000 or even a month’s rent in cash.”
Sketchy keys-for-cash schemes are popular on Craigslist:
Carried out online where almost all rental transactions begin these days, this ploy separates would-be renters from their money before they so much as set foot inside a dwelling. In this scheme, information and pictures from legitimate rental or sales listings are lifted from other sites and reposted under another name at an eye-poppingly low rent.
“It’s bad enough when another real estate agent takes one of my exclusives and uses the pictures to suck in clients,” said Sabrina Seidner, a vice president at Nest Seekers International whose listing of her own co-op apartment in Inwood was purloined last month. “But when they use it to hurt people and prey on their need for a hot deal, it gives you a bad feeling.”
In her case, someone claiming to have relocated to London advertised Ms. Seidner’s one-bedroom apartment on Craigslist. At least one prospective renter was induced to fill out an application and send personal information before becoming suspicious of a request for a $200 deposit to borrow the keys.
“Two people who contacted me about it had Googled the address of my apartment and found it listed for sale,” Ms. Seidner said.
And then there are people who just totally suck and take your money:
Another young subtenant, Autumn Marie Griffin, 26, discovered she was being scammed only after she had been renting an apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for two years. Although she had felt initial misgivings about the man and woman she sublet from, she shook them off. Her wake-up call was an eviction notice.
“Basically, the man my roommate and I had been subletting from had been pocketing the rent for almost the whole time,” said Ms. Griffin, a publicist. Their landlord, whose rent was actually a quarter of the $1,150 he was charging them, had forged the building manager’s signature on the sublease the women had signed.
Lesson learned - it's a cruel world out there. But part of me doesn't pity these victims as much as I think I'm supposed to. Sure, I bet there people out there getting screwed in ways that no one could have predicted - and I feel for them. But a lot of the people in this article really had it coming. I mean, Park Avenue apartments for $1,300 a month? Putting down money on an apartment you haven't even seen? Meeting someone at 2 in the morning so they can sweatily explain to you that you can't move in yet and then ask you for more cash? Am I a total asshole to think that these people got ripped off because they were idiots? I completely understand that I know next to nothing about real estate, but what was lacking here was just common sense.
Anyway, I don't think the moral of the story is that Craigslist is evil - it's that Craigslist is evil if you are stupid and not evil if you are smart. Apparently my parents think I am likely to do something completely idiodic, like put down a deposit on an apartment I've never seen before or go meet with fake landlords in the middle of the night.
It's good to know they trust me.
No comments:
Post a Comment