131–140 of 153 posts
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They have rental scams here where they will show you the house as well. One is where they pretend to be realtors and get the key from the listing agent.
I usually look up the tax records of the house. They are usually available on the county website and will show the owners name and when the house was last sold.
Interesting! I encountered this same exact scammer recently and as soon as he sent the email with all the pictures I knew it was a scam. I was definitely fooled up to that point as well though...
My apologies..I know this is a bit unrelated but I saw that you had a post for a full stack developer listed almost a couple months ago I wanted to find out if this opening is still available or if it has been filled? Thanks
The very first email from the "landlord" would tell me it was a scam. Maybe it's just because I've been doing things on the internet from before the web was a thing, but that's a pretty obvious scam. The whole "I'm working away from my usual home city on oil/mining/gas projects in (HARD TO REACH LOCATION)" thing is at least 20 years old now for scams.
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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 not…
that's a lot of overhead and effort for a scam. It would be easier to just to have a normal job such as being a software developer.
Sure it is, but there's a whole world outside of the US, where jobs aren't as easy to find, nor as well paying as software developer job in the US.
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That is really mind blowing to me. I just looked at the local rental website for my small town and the first 2 bedroom duplex I looked at had a nice yard and looked good on the inside and was only $900/month. That is in Canadian dollars too I may add. That $4550 would be about $6000 Canadian and you would have people begging you to move in if you agreed to pay them a portion of that.The highest rental I see on the si…
What's the city and what website did you use? I didn't find many such options when was looking over (though not that thoroughly).
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Banks don't conduct such audits.
If the loan requires that all units be rented for $x they will do something to check.
It's pretty amazing that modern browsers don't flag .com. as a scam. Is there any legitimate use for addresses like this? It's also amazing that email software doesn't highlight fake link texts. There should be a rule that if the text looks like a URL then the actual URL has to match it exactly.
I was under the impression that in quite a few countries they are quite widely used. E.g. .com.au in Australia.
Surely it's reasonable to flag .com.blahblahblah.thing.spamdomain as fishy?
.com.au/ or any other actual country top level domain is ok
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Browsers should flag .com. It's pretty unbelievable that in 2020 your browser just les this through
Presumably you mean airbnb.𝗰𝗼𝗺.rooms-040349.town But this only works for .com, whereas worldwide there are plenty of two-letter TLDs, which are often used as subdomains (e.g. dk.ebay.com and www.ebay.dk.).
It's not perfect but it would make this type of phish a lot harder.
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>And then you get SF residents being paid well into 6 figures and unable to have a decent standard of living. It's just crazy to me. To be more accurate, it is only a subset of SF residents (in the IT space) that get that kind of pay, I often wonder how is the life of those that do not belong to that elite and that do not make that kind of 6 figures money.
They don't live in SF. It isn't unheard of to commute two hours for a retail job in SF just to get where you can afford the rent.
If we take these as valid data:
https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/occupationalem...
And set an arbitrary threshold at 45 US$/hour, the amount of people exceeding that are 31.1%, if we set it at 50 US$/hour they are 19.4%.
If we draw another line, those that get less than 25 US$/hour are 42.1% and those that get more than 25 but less than 45 are 26.6%.
So, even if we assume that 40% of people commutes for long distances (and BTW technically are not SF residents), since only between 20% and 30% of San Francisco workers can actually afford it, it still leaves us with 30%-40% of people that must be in a really tight spot.
From the screenshot, the scam is actually pretty easy to spot if you know what to look for. Here's some clues: 1. All accomodations are available (w/d in unit, pets ok, wheelchair accessible, furnished!) - eliminating listings with all of these checked will nearly eliminate the scam listings. 2. The description doesn't include any information about who's the renter. Usually the landlord or property manager will menti…
So, we often hear that "it's so easy to detect these scam listings" in ebay, amazon, air bnb, here, etc. (same for false reviews, etc.) But if it were so easy, why do companies not work harder to block them out? (I know, Craig's List is a bit of an outlier as a hands-off marketplace, but let's assume that they come under fire for these issues and are forced to make a statement) Is it the liability issues (blocking co…
Heuristics that are easy for a human to apply aren't always so easy for a computer. How do you quickly judge in a programming language if a photo is of professional quality but nothing about the renting agent is mentioned? How do you judge if it's priced high enough to be vaguely plausible, but suspicious in context, by knowing intimate details of the local market in the way someone living there does?
I think detecting scams is much harder than most people really want to admit. Which is why stopping them is challenging.