With a new year upon us, college students everywhere are going to be looking to rent and sublet apartments before the summer. Naturally whenever there are large amounts of money and property changing hands, there is bound to be fraud. This past weekend I was alerted to a type of online scam targeting college students in the housing market with what appear to be fake requests to rent or sublet off campus apartments. It appears that a scammer informs the subletting student that they are planning to move from another country (RED FLAG 1), in this case South Africa, to the school that the student is currently attending and will be in need of housing. If the student responds with further information regarding the rental, they are likely to begin receiving a series of emails from the scammer in which they are told a very elaborate story of how the scammer will need to fly in to view the rental apartment before agreeing to the contract but because of family finance struggles this will be hard to accomplish (RED FLAG 2). The scammer then goes on to say that he/she will send the student a check to cover rent plus enough money for the student to send back via a wiring service to cover travel expenses so the prospective renter can come view the apartment (RED FLAG 3). This is usually where the scammer gets screwed over…if you’re smart. If you’re not and you agree to this transaction, you’re about to lose a lot of money.
What usually happens is this; the student will receive an actual check, which he/she will deposit into their bank account. If you’re finance savvy, you will at least wait until the check clears before doing anything else, just to be sure it’s not a scam. Even doing this is sometimes not fail safe. In some cases, the check may appear to clear and everything may seem well, but there may be fraudulent activity on the other end that your bank hasn’t detected yet. You may even go and send the requested amount of money back to the scammer to cover their “travel expenses”. The problem is, that after you go and do this, the bank will likely find that the check was fraudulent, and now you’re out however much you decided to spend or send back because the bank has to cover the amount of the fraudulent check.
While this scam is not a new one (there are reports of it going back to 2004 and maybe even earlier), it is one that is still used today. As stated, I was just witness to an occurrence of it a week ago. If you’re in the college housing/renting market, just keep an eye open and play it smart. If something seems suspicious, do a little research before you dive in. The prospect of subletting your apartment and not having to pay rent for the summer is very appealing, but don’t let yourself get played by an Internet scammer!
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