Beware of Scammers on Craigslist

Have you ever been caught up in a scam before? Many of us probably have and we just headed one off before it was able to culminate. Many of you may use Craigslist as a way of buying and selling things over the Internet. We advertise many of our properties for sale using Craigslist. We are able to put pictures as well as a virtual tour of the home into our advertisement. It is surprising the amount of activity that we are able to generate in an advertising medium.

Here is how the attempted scam worked. Some bad person out there in the Internet world took the pictures from my advertisement for a property in place them in a Craigslist ad of a home for rent. The rent was especially low in the advertisement. This bad person said that they were the owner and were out of the country buying property in Africa someplace and needed to get the property rented right away. They created an e-mail account in the name of the seller@yahoo.com and had that e-mail go directly to them, the bad people. People actually showed up at the house and knocked on the door to see the property very much to the seller's surprise. One real estate broker in town called me because his son was looking for a place to rent and mentioned the property to his father who then called me about the house. The bad person's advertisement specifically says to not bother the Realtor because they're about to take the property off the market. Their goal was to get the prospective tenant to send them $900 as a damage deposit and when they had received a damage deposit, they would then send the keys to the prospect.

It is hard to believe that anyone would fall for this scheme, but people do. The especially low rent tends to be a dead giveaway but so does the traveling out of the country excuse. We immediately contacted the Sheriff's Department and it's hard to know where this will end up. Hopefully they can trace the location of the bad people through the Yahoo account.

We are very thankful that several of the potential victims contacted us anyway and all have been willing to talk with the Sheriff. These scam artists are a dime a dozen and I hope by sharing this information with you, that you won't end up being caught by something as goofy as this.

When you have Durango real estate needs, we hope you'll give the Team Lorenz a call and let us provide professional services for you.