Fraudsters are advertising apartments while impersonating management company personnel.
Periodically, criminals posing as property owners advertise apartment availability with the intent to defraud people who are looking for a place to live.
In recent years, Craigslist was the favored platform for these schemes, where prospective residents are offered attractive rents and send money to their new “landlord,” only to learn that they are fictitious and not the actual owner or manager of the apartment.
The latest scheme involves users of sublet.com, with website addresses appearing as: sublet.com/property/******. The asterisks appear as a six-digit number assigned to each “available” property.
The scheme involves inventing a phony email address for a real senior employee of a real property management company, for instance, JDoe@ company-rental.com.
NAA is aware of this activity in nine states so far.
Several would-be residents have already been fooled by this latest scam and sent their money to those behind the fraud.
Please alert your local media outlets and state Attorney General of this ongoing campaign to defraud consumers.