One last night seemed borderline, could have been true but probably not. So, I sent an email:
Instantly, the automated response came:
Right, scam. Fine. I flagged the posting and moved on, but was frustrated and fed up with dealing with trying to find a home while simultaneously protecting my backside from being thusly penetrated. So I sent an immature email back:
Silly, like hiding in the dark under the covers and flipping mommy the bird after she makes you go to bed at 9:30 (the bitch), but I felt slightly better for having vented.
And then this morning, I got this:
Well fine, assbasket. If you’ve got enough free time to respond to an email as asinine as mine, then I’ve got enough time to jerk you around for a while. What do you guys think I should do to screw with the good fellow?
Tell him you have his deposit, along with an extra $2,000 if he’ll facilitate a bank transfer for you… He just has to deposit the money order you send him for $10k, keep $2,800 for himself, and then send you the balance…
Well, the standard response is to make him take a ridiculous picture of himself to prove his identity. (Warning: that picture is Work Safe, but some other pictures on that site definitely aren’t).
Forgive me, but while this does seem suspicious I would give it enough credence to at least follow up a little more. It shouldn’t be that hard to check this with JP Chase right? Ask Justin for a specific person to contact, if he can’t provide - screw it. If he can, then perhaps, just perhaps it is on the up and up. Get the bank account details - perhaps it very genuinely is a JP Chase account (again you can get a pretty good indication whether the money goes to a trust account or an individual once you have the actual details right?)
I am sure there are many, many people on Craigslist and similar sites who would be only too willing to educate you in the follies of trusting suspicious seeming people on the internet. Just be sure to have a nice large stack of cash to pay for the lessons.
It’s a scam and should be given zero credence or less. There are tons of similar postings on Craigslist. I started a GQ thread about it recently to ask what the angle is, not realizing it’s the simplest one imaginable - they’re just trying to get the deposit.
I would have followed up a little more as well. I would never put down a deposit for an apartment I hadn’t seen, and I probably would have e-mailed the guy to that effect and then seen what he said. “You send money, then you view apartment,” is not a reasonable expectation.
Oh, it’s a scam. Believe me. My fiancee is a real-estate agent, and agents all throughout the Atlanta area are having their listings re-posted on Craigslist as rentals by scam artists trying to get a deposit. And when he gave the address of the building, I went on a Google Street View tour - the building is less than a mile from the Georgia Aquarium and World of Coca-Cola. The building’s also listed with Coldwell Banker, as you can see in the window in the street view, and those condos are currently selling, not renting, for $400k.
There is no reason to follow up further: there is a 100% probability that this is a scam, and a 0% probability that it is legit.
The pattern itself is insane: nobody rents out apartments like this. Insurance for allowing random strangers into the place unsupervised after mailing them the key? Really? JP Morgan Chase is in the residential rental management business now, as well as being your insurer? Really?
Any one of those in itself would be more than enough to convince me, but in addition we have the super nice apartment description - having lived in Atlanta that is not a $800pm apartment, in much the same way a new Bentley is not a $13,000 car
People do move far away and rent out their apartments while they are gone (we actually do have a legitimate apartment that we are renting out in Atlanta). However, the listing will not look like this. They’d probably use a rental management company that would handle everything in their absence. From the tenants point of view it will still look like a “standard” rental process: you’ll view the apartment (no money down!) with the rental agent, etc.
Why even bother? Did you look at the pictures and read the description? No way in heck that apartment is going for $800 a month (internet, cable and other utilities all included no less!).
The lowball rent advertised is obviously intended to entice potentials victims to turn off their brains in the hopes of a good deal. Much like the car ads with people selling their cars at <25% of Blue Book because they are “depolying overseas”, etc.
Edit: I see this horse has already been beaten a bit.
Step 1: Find broken, super heavy appliance. Rip out everything that could possibly be useful.
Step 2: Claim you’re sending 20 laptops as a deposit. Require scammer to pay shipping. Ship massive hunk of junk instead.
Step 3: Laugh as they fume, and ideally convince them it was all a mistake and you’ll REALLY ship the laptops this time. Rinse, repeat.
Of course, the guy I linked to above has a lot of resources at hand (i.e., heavy broken crap), a decoy address so the scammers can’t get his REAL address, voice artist skill, and a ton of time.
An absentee landlord in itself isn’t unusual. But any sane absentee landlord is going to have a local agent to handle finding tenants, maintenance work, getting the rent, etc. From a tenants point of view the interaction with the agent will be pretty much the same as if they were interacting with the local owner.
