I’m looking for an apartment. There are a lot of listings on Craigslist in my price range. However, most of them are scams.
One dickhead had me fill out a whole application, which I emailed back to him, and received this in return:
Can you believe this shit?
Another one I’ve been getting: I respond to an ad, saying “I’m looking to move to this neighborhood soon, I have a steady job and good credit, blah blah blah… please contact me at <phone number>.” Then I get a response back that says
Apparently, one of those shady “free credit report” companies* is putting up fake ads on Craigslist. They get you to go to their website, then offer a free credit report in exchange for signing up for their “credit protection” bullshit, which is $14.95 a month or whatever. That’s the only explanation I can figure for this garbage.
I swear, people can be such fuckers.
*Everyone is entitled to one free credit report per year, by law, and you don’t have to sign up for anything. The FTC-approved website is www.annualcreditreport.com, and it costs NOTHING!It doesn’t give you a credit score, you have to buy that from the individual agencies, but there’s no reason you should ever need that anyway.
The credit report scam is probably so they can steal your identity. Likely they would ask you for detailed personal information including social security numbers.
You could go 419-eater style on the Nigeria guy. The more of his time you waste, the fewer people he has time to scam.
What can we say? It’s craigslist and it’s rife with scams. I’ve found more success by posting my own “housing wanted” ads than by placing emails to the “housing available” ads posted by others.
It also helps to have a boilerplate email if you’re going to respond to the ads of others (how much is rent, how’s the parking situation, w/d included? etc). That way you don’t waste a lot of time if half of them turn out to be scammy.
Hey we got rid of / gave away our dog on Craig’s List.
Knowing the “guy behind the dumpster” reputation, she took our 6’-4” 250lb friend with her to meet them in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
Come to think of it we found a new home for our rabbit that same way.*
So if you want to get rid of some money, that’s a great way to do it. Though it might be safer to just throw it in the dumpster than to even look at the guy there.
*We don’t hate animals; we just found out various members of our household have various allergies.
I got the Jessica thing too. Told the illustrious girlfriend that it’s a scam.
Should we merge this with the scam-filled crapfest that is rentals.com thread I started and have a general thread about the shit we find when online rental hunting?
This weekend my GF was telling me about the response she got to her ad for renting out her spare room and before she finished the first sentence I said “it’s a scam” and told her exactly what was in the rest of the response and what would happen next. I earned some good brownie points for that.
Because there are a lot of us who still believe in “The buyer beware”, and learn how the system works. The deals to be had are too good to pass up. I made almost 6k last year just buying and reselling stuff while I was at work.
So I welcome the scams. It keeps out the riff-raff who would otherwise eat into my profits.
A great way to see at a glance if a rental ad is a fake is to right click in the middle of the ad page; if it wants to copy the whole thing like some kind of media, it’s a fake. It’s been created as a .jpg or what have you to make it easier to repost like a mofo all over creation.
My friend got the old ‘Daughter in the UK with breast cancer’ con.
It’s terrifying, I’ve been guiding her through the process of finding a new apartment. I just had to tell her to not use Craigslist at all. It’s a giant scam here because no one uses it, everyone uses Kijiji, so you know anyone posting to Craigslist is fake.
Timely rant. I spent all day yesterday looking at apartment sites. The biggest things I ran across were the “rent to own” housing ads. The ones that say, “The house in the pictures may not be available, but…” Jesus, I won’t even rent to own a toaster.
More likely pay per signup commissions. Many such outfits pay you a dollar or two for everyone who signs up for the service via your link. A couple hundred folks later…profit.
