How can I tell the scams from the real ads in Craig's List?

Factual Questions
1

In house rentals?

2

A lot of factors tend to (but don’t always) indicate scams:

  • Sounds too good to be true

  • Doesn’t really describe the property very well, e.g. how many bedrooms

  • Poor English, structured in a way that a native speaker wouldn’t speak

  • Nothing about the ad mentions anything local, e.g. area of town property is in

  • No company name or phone number, just an email address

  • It’s a rental but important factors like price, status of pets, parking etc aren’t mentioned at all
    Reasonable precautions you can take:

  • If in doubt, take a random sentence through the ad and post it in Google. Scammers usually recycle text in multiple cities. If the ad is crossposted in Atlanta and Los Angeles, it’s probably a scam.

  • Use a dedicated junk email address when contacting people on Craigslist.

  • Never fill out personal information (such as to get a “credit report”) without first viewing the property in person and meeting the owner. You shouldn’t need to divulge anything to just view the property.

  • Person is out of town and wants to set everything up remotely, with no local contact that you can meet with first? Run. Even if this isn’t a scam, you need a local contact person for maintenance requests and stuff. But chances are, it’s a scam.

  • Highlight any whitespaces in the ad to make sure there is no ‘hidden text’ that has a bunch of keywords. If there is, it’s probably a scammer or spammer.

Scammers rely on people who aren’t really looking for them. A little bit of reasonable precautions and you’ll be fine. Just ask when you can see the place and 99% of scammers will spring then to try to get money or info from you first.

3

If they even mention Western Union or MoneyGram, or any other form of wire transfer, it’s a scam.

4

These are Craigslist’s own rules. The basic procedure is just to email the offerer asking when you can view the property. If they said they’re can’t meet you for some reason, for instance because they’re abroad, or if they ask you to meet any sort of condition before you can view the property, it’s a scam.

5

Rental scams are common on Craig’s. You can’t even trust looking at the property with the supposed owner/agent. You really need to check the ownership through the county to be sure.