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Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

jeffreyladish.com

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Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#51

Post by TylerE »

sjf wrote: post #49

It makes me deeply depressed that real estate is huge right now, many more people than ever are renting and we still have to deal with Craiglist scams to find a place to live. Ignoring the fact that the last ten years of UX seems to have passed Craiglist by, it's unbelievable that such a huge site has the absolute minimum of fraud prevention. There are so many comments on here about various kinds of CL scams, why doe…

https://www.socialserve.com/

Focused primarily on low-income and accessible (disability-friendly) housing, but many listings for perfectly normal places.

Free to both landlords and tenants - funding comes from various government agencies, mostly housing authorities.

Disclaimer: Employer, views represent my own, etc

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#52

Post by unishark »

sjf wrote: post #49

It makes me deeply depressed that real estate is huge right now, many more people than ever are renting and we still have to deal with Craiglist scams to find a place to live. Ignoring the fact that the last ten years of UX seems to have passed Craiglist by, it's unbelievable that such a huge site has the absolute minimum of fraud prevention. There are so many comments on here about various kinds of CL scams, why doe…

You'd think they have the world's biggest dataset of scam posts too, with people constantly labeling posts for them (including law enforcement).

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#53

Post by imglorp »

Scoundreller wrote: post #42
imglorp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy, story time. I encountered the opposite scam. I was selling a house myself. I took photos, paid to have it listed, posted a sign out front, and posted ads in various places including CL. Someone contacted me to say they responded to an ad on CL for a rental house. The prospective renter was told by the scammer he was out of town and that they could go to the house and look around the property. He would transac…

VoIP can be “backtracked”. Takes a bit of effort, but the DOJ got providers to do it for the fake IRS/SSA/INS calls. There’s a standardized process for it. Might lead to a deader-end, but “it’s VoIP so we can’t do anything” is a cop-out.

Nod. The cops were decent, they put some effort in, but it wasn't the crime of the century so they weren't going all-out with subpoenas for an attempted petty scam. Also, we couldn't find anyone who was actually burned, although this guy could have been operating many ads in many markets. It's a living, I guess.

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#54

Post by roel_v »

cissou wrote: post #11

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 definit…

Large parts of this can be automated (scraping profiles, setting up ads based on that scraped info, templates for responses etc), CRM system to track interactions, for which you have 'white collar' staff. The rest you farm out to call center style operations, the 'blue collar' work, who can also do things like 'customer support' for ransomware victims etc. There are entire villages in e.g. Eastern Europe that are notorious for housing gangs like this. They're actual businesses, ran in a professional manner, with an HR department and tech support guys and accounting people etc. The key to financial success is keeping all your staff occupied in a efficient manner - balancing the 'lead generation' with the actual work involved, just like any other business.

Edit: Google "Râmnicu Vâlcea" if you're into this sort of stuff and have some time to go down an internet rabbit hole.

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#55

Post by sokoloff »

pmiller2 wrote: post #36
jimmaswell wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or sensitive personal info Shouldn't be confused with requiring SSN etc for a background and credit check which is standard now.

I don’t give my SSN to anyone I haven’t met, unless it’s a legitimate property management or background check site.

Are you saying that you’re protected from an SSN phish on an illegitimate site because you’re careful to only enter your SSN on legitimate sites? How do you know they’re legit?

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#56

Post by Johnny555 »

somehnguy wrote: post #48

The scammer almost immediately sending a bunch of photos of 'himself' is very interesting to me. I've noticed the same technique on dating apps. 9/10 times if the person you're talking to is not real they'll send a 'casual' looking photo after 3-4 back and forth messages, completely unsolicited. Like the author of this article it seems to be a misguided attempt to prove that they're real somehow and immediately gives…

I've noticed the same technique on dating apps. 9/10 times if the person you're talking to is not real they'll send a 'casual' looking photo after 3-4 back and forth messages, completely unsolicited.

I used to do the same when online dating -- despite many people's claim to the contrary, much of dating is physical (i.e. visual) attraction, so I sent additional pics (natural, not staged) early in the conversation just to find out if it was going to go anywhere... whether solicited or not.

But I was male -- if a super attractive woman sent me pics unsolicited, then I knew it was a scam. (my apologies if any real women were out there that look like super models, but were searching for your true love online if only someone would help you pay for a visa)

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#57

Post by iscrewyou »

So apt. I’m moving to the Monterey area in the coming months and looking at places to rent. I started with Craigslist and emailed some listings without thinking much of it. And fell for one person telling me they can’t let me see the property but I have to send them an application with rent attached. I quickly realized what was happening. Then I moved on to Zillow and saw postings by rental agencies mixed in postings by unknowns. So I think those are scammy too(the unknowns). From Zillow I got some names of property management companies and now I look straight on their website.

It seems like people on Zillow copy rental agency postings for scamming. But they definitely copy Zillow postings on to craigslist.

This arrival seemed relevant to what I’m going through now. So I figured I’d pitch in with a bit of my story.

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#58

Post by Spooky23 »

samschooler wrote: post #12
Spooky23 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can respect that. Perhaps I'm being unfair.

In my area and my experience, I've had about a half dozen interactions with Facebook for significant things. 4/6 were straight up scams.

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#59

Post by roel_v »

sjf wrote: post #47
pmiller2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Points 2 and 3 are not sure signs of a scam. Some landlords use “stock” photos that may be the same as the ones on Redfin/Zillow/MLS. And, there are “management companies” that amount to an 80 year old guy, his 2 sons, and one of his grandsons, that don’t have a website because they only manage their own properties. These 2 scenarios describe my current and previous apartments, respectively.

Yes, but if the photos obviously unprofessional, badly light and taken with a phone- it is definitely _not_ a scam. Similarly, no dogs/no cats- almost definitely _not_ a scam. Every scam listing I've seen has had pets OK.

Yeah that's the one that stuck out to me. An apartment as nice as the one described wouldn't allow pets, at least not if they're as experienced as they claimed to be here.

Re: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

#60

Post by unishark »

somehnguy wrote: post #48

The scammer almost immediately sending a bunch of photos of 'himself' is very interesting to me. I've noticed the same technique on dating apps. 9/10 times if the person you're talking to is not real they'll send a 'casual' looking photo after 3-4 back and forth messages, completely unsolicited. Like the author of this article it seems to be a misguided attempt to prove that they're real somehow and immediately gives…

So you're saying dating sites are also full of scammers trying to con people out of money somehow? That fits. I have a (decades) old account on one of them which I recently noticed was sending messages to my spam folder. I reset the password etc to get back into the account, where I found a bunch of fake pictures (i.e. not of me) along with the old text I had there and my own attributes. Was wondering what was going on. I guess my pictures weren't deemed good enough for the scam.
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