Rental Scam Information – Protecting the Public from Rental Scammers

Houses for Rent Scams

There are many more houses for rent scams than there are apartment for rent scams.  The major reason for this is most apartments are run by large REITs and property managers. If you are an owner of a rental house and are renting out your property by owner here are some tips to help stop the possibility of having scammers repost your rental property on Craigslist or other sites.

1. For photos, use a watermark. Water marked photos have a lower probability of being copied.
2. Don’t share your email address within your ad
3. Don’t use your personal phone number in ad, use a service that uses a toll free number instead
4. Periodically check craigslist and other sites to see if your ad has been copied

Known Rental Scammers

helen_brown35@hotmail.com
ruth_robinson50@hotmail.com

Known Rental Scammer – susan.marshall15@yahoo.com

Hello
Thanks for your response regarding your interest in having my house for rent.The house is much available for now and it a 3 bedroom home..I want you to know that i am the owner of this building situated at 11934 W 71st Place Arvada , CO 80004 .But i am now presently in West Africa for my Hopitals Project prayer crusade with my wife and we have the keys right here with us.I will like to inform you that it was due to my transfer that makes us to leave the house and also want to give it out for rent and looking for a resposible person that can take very good care of it as we are not after the money for the rent but want it to be clean at the time and the person that will rent it to take it as if it were its own..So for now,We are here in West Africa,NIGERIA our new house and also with the keys of the house,we are trying to look for an agent that we can give this document before we left but could not see and we are as well as don’t want our house to be used any how in our absent that is why we took it along with us here.We are only willing to give the house out to a lovely and caring family only, so if you know you cannot give the house the neatness it deserves please don’t contact me.But if you promise to always take good care of the house,get back to me on how you could take care of our house or perhaps experience you have in renting a home.Hope you are okay with the monthly price of $700 with hydro,heat laundry facilities,air-condition Etc.I am looking forward to hear from you ASAP,Our house number is +234-802-891-2665 or 011234-703-457-8588, below is the application form for you to fill and discuss on how to get the house for rent..
Kindly confirm your interest by filling the form below:
TENANT RENT APPLICATION
FIRST NAME: __________________
MIDDLE NAME: __________________
LAST NAME: __________________
PROFESSION: ________________
PHONE (____) __________ (CELL)
PHONE (____) __________ (WORK)
PHONE (____) __________ (HOME)
MARITAL STATUS: _________
KIDS _____ (YES/NO), HOW MANY ________
Home ADDRESS: ___________________________
CITY: _______________
STATE: ______________
ZIPCODE: ____________
HOW LONG? ___________IF RENTING
WHY ARE YOU LEAVING? _______________________________________________________________________
CURRENT RENT: _______
IF THIS House IS BEING GIVEN TO YOU,
HOW LONG DO YOU INTEND STAYING? ____________
WHEN DO YOU INTEND MOVING IN? ______________

Looking forward to hear from you with all this details so that i can have it in my file incase of issuing the receipt for you and contacting you.Await your urgent reply so that we can discuss on how to get the document and the key to you,please we are giving you all this base on t r ust and again i will want you to stick to your words,you know that,we do not see yet and only putting everything into Gods hand,so please do not let us down in this our property and God bless you more as you do this.
Regards.

—-

We have decided to let you live in our house. As we have found your application very satisfactry and acceptable by my family. so we would want you to go through the acceptance form and get back to us on what you feel. I will be giving you a call later . 
We would like to send the following document to you via FEDEX to the address you sent to us and the tracking number will be sent to you so that you can possibly occupy our house, Please once again, we are giving you this on trust and do not dissapoint us and i promise you that, you will love the house. So we are with the below document here with us. you will need to make Payment for Rent deposit and shippment of the Keys and document to the address you will have to provide to us .
 
Here are the contents of the document.

Top Rental Search Cities for rentBits

Our rental search engine, rentbits.com, has been growing each month since launch. We recently wrote about the top cities in which Google Analytics tracks the cities and traffic for rentbits. It can be found here.

rentBits currently crawls over 500,000 active rental listings each day and we wanted to make this available for the top cities in the US.