What I'm left wondering is: what is the payoff for these scams? These aren't easy to scale, as you need to be manually writing plausible looking, personalized emails, waiting for someone to take the bait, "nurture" them over days or weeks, etc. Also you need specific, valuable skills: between the social engineering, the actual engineering, the perfect grammar, the creativity, someone who can pull this off can definitely get a high-paying, honest job pretty much anywhere. Add to that the hassle of having to constantly change web hosts, stories, payment processors, etc. as you're constantly going to be chased by your previously scammed "customers", and the very real risk of prosecution. The payoff must be ENORMOUS for it to be worth all this trouble. What am I missing?
Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam
11–20 of 153 posts
Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam
#12This scams are very common and fairly easy to detected even without contacting the person. I have been looking at apartments since november and finally found a place in January, and this is the third apartment I have rented in SF over the last 5 years. I believe this one would have been caught by point 2. Detecting a SF craigslist rental scam: 1. Is it too good to be true? Its a scam. What's too good to be true you a…
All I need is one question: On Craigslist? Probably a scam.
To be fair my last apartment I rented off Craigslist:
- He paid me $1000 to move in
- Gave me all of his furniture for free
- Paid my application fee
I actually got the apartment via a sublease and opted to continue his lease. A few months ago I sold the furniture for a profit and moved with no issue.
Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
All I need is one question: On Craigslist? Probably a scam.
Sure, if you don't care about the false positive rate of your prediction function.
What are the downsides to missing a legit listing on Craigslist versus falling for one of these scams? I think in this case, having a prediction function with high low false negative rate, but high false positive rate for scams is better than the inverse.
Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam
#14What I'm left wondering is: what is the payoff for these scams? These aren't easy to scale, as you need to be manually writing plausible looking, personalized emails, waiting for someone to take the bait, "nurture" them over days or weeks, etc. Also you need specific, valuable skills: between the social engineering, the actual engineering, the perfect grammar, the creativity, someone who can pull this off can definit…
First month + last month + deposit (1-2 months) to move in. It's also very common for landlords to ask for cashier's checks or even cash to avoid possibility of checks bouncing. The rent was $4300/month so this could easily be $15k. Per person they can sucker up until the final deadline for renting it. That scumbag might be making more than we do.
I'm guessing there is little risk of prosecution wherever they are.
Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam
#15This scams are very common and fairly easy to detected even without contacting the person. I have been looking at apartments since november and finally found a place in January, and this is the third apartment I have rented in SF over the last 5 years. I believe this one would have been caught by point 2. Detecting a SF craigslist rental scam: 1. Is it too good to be true? Its a scam. What's too good to be true you a…
> make sure the person actually own the place/has the right to rent the apartment.
What's the right way to do this?
Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam
#16What I'm left wondering is: what is the payoff for these scams? These aren't easy to scale, as you need to be manually writing plausible looking, personalized emails, waiting for someone to take the bait, "nurture" them over days or weeks, etc. Also you need specific, valuable skills: between the social engineering, the actual engineering, the perfect grammar, the creativity, someone who can pull this off can definit…
Getting a job works if you live in an area that has those jobs available. The currency that you get from these scams might also convert really well to the local currency, making it higher paying than a real job.
Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam
#17This scams are very common and fairly easy to detected even without contacting the person. I have been looking at apartments since november and finally found a place in January, and this is the third apartment I have rented in SF over the last 5 years. I believe this one would have been caught by point 2. Detecting a SF craigslist rental scam: 1. Is it too good to be true? Its a scam. What's too good to be true you a…
> or sensitive personal info
Shouldn't be confused with requiring SSN etc for a background and credit check which is standard now.
Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam
#18At the place I moved into, they apparently had to constantly remove signs scammers had put in the yard.
Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam
#19This scams are very common and fairly easy to detected even without contacting the person. I have been looking at apartments since november and finally found a place in January, and this is the third apartment I have rented in SF over the last 5 years. I believe this one would have been caught by point 2. Detecting a SF craigslist rental scam: 1. Is it too good to be true? Its a scam. What's too good to be true you a…
> make sure the person actually own the place/has the right to rent the apartment. What's the right way to do this?
For a house/condo, presumably you can just search for the property online and see who the owner is. Then when you are only writing checks to the actual owner's name, I would feel pretty safe.
Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam
#20This is the one downside of Let's Encrypt. They made running https scam sites cheap and easy. I still think having https everywhere is worth the trade off, but the downside should be acknowledged. I wish there were an EV certificate like alternative for sites where actual money is involved (banking, hotels, etc) which cost a decent amount of money, so that at least the cost of running these scams would go up. For exa…
That isn't a downside of L.E. though because HTTPS by itself was never meant to imply trust in the site, and any notions to that effect should rightly be dispelled. Sounds more like a benefit of LetsEncrypt if it brought more awareness to this.
And FWIW the EV cert that sites like AirBNB buy cost in the range of $500. The cost isn't what makes it prohibitive, though, but instead it's the corporate and personal identity that they (should) do as a part of the process.