I always thought that I was too smart to be scammed… and yet here we are

Generation Rent has conducted research which found that over half of Facebook Marketplace rental listings appear to be scams. Comparing 300 rental property adverts, the research reveals the dangers of searching for privately rented homes on Facebook Marketplace, with almost three quarters (74%) of listings being found to contain at least one indicator that the advert is suspicious or a scam, according to Meta’s own guidance. Read more about the research here.

Saduni is just one renter who has been the victim on online scams. This is her story.

It was November 2020, everything was all up in the air and my partner and I were looking for a house to rent in London. So a really easy-breezy, fun time as you can imagine! 

Finding a house to rent in London has always been a full-time job in itself and to do it amidst the uncertainty of a pandemic was tough. Nonetheless, we got onto SpareRoom, signed up for the early bird access (which you have to pay for) and went hunting.  

A South Asian girl, in her early 20s, replied to our enquiry of a one-bedroom flat in Whitechapel for £1200 a month. She said she’s sad about leaving the property, that the landlord is great and that she would put us in contact directly with him. I was naive at the time, and I thought that renting directly from a landlord was a green flag and jumped at the opportunity. 

The landlord was a South Asian man in his mid 30s, let’s call him ‘Ronald’. ‘Ronald’ was very down to earth and personable – he made sure that we knew that he had a partner, and, being of the same ethnicity, he connected with us on a cultural level. It worked very well, and we felt very safe and seen.  

The apartment was lovely. Lots of natural light, spacious bedrooms and it had a beautiful kitchen and bathroom. All of this for a reasonable price? I should have known something was off. There was a bed in the living room as well as the bedroom. This was slightly odd as Ronald let us know that it was a couple that was currently renting the flat. This should have been my first red flag.

Typical period and more modern London houses with distant suburban terraces and apartment blocks – Muswell hill looking towards Crouch End in London

We said we wanted the flat after the viewing and we made the necessary arrangements. He sent us the tenancy agreement and we read it through and signed it the next day. He was adamant that we pay the deposit as soon as possible to take the flat off the market. This felt very normal because of how fast paced flat hunting usually is in London.

For once we weren’t rushing viewings and everything was sorted a month in advance, things seemed to be smooth sailing…this was short lived.

Things start to go wrong

A week before we were to move in, I was texting ‘Ronald’ to arrange the parking for the moving van. Out of nowhere he said that the tenants in the flat had been infected with Covid, and that he was unsure of what the protocol was to continue. 

He said that he was going to call the Covid advice line and find out. He was very apologetic, and he even said that he and his partner were recently in contact with them, and we felt bad that they could potentially have been infected too. Long story short, he said that he would refund us the whole deposit. Those were the last words he ever said to us.

At this point our current landlord was threatening to evict us with no notice, which was illegal and against our rights as renters! But we still felt like we needed to move to a safer more secure living situation. 

We found a house within a week, but unfortunately fell into another scam by a letting agent! 

SpareRoom contacted us because they saw that we were in contact with the girl who we had originally posted the ad. They informed us that ‘Ronald’ had been pretending to be her and the landlord all along. The scammer had been using an Airbnb to lure desperate tenants into giving them deposits and running off with the money. 

We were completely dumbfounded.

We opened an Action Fraud report, but they were not able to find a line of inquiry and there were no further updates. 

After doing some investigating, I came to the bitter realisation that the proof of the deposit scheme was a screenshot, most probably created on Photoshop. And after Googling the watermark on the tenancy agreement, I realised he had downloaded a template online. 

All this to say, please be careful when you’re renting in London!

If you have been affected by fraud or scams, you can seek support at Action Fraud. 

Read more about how to tell if an advert is a scam here.

Saduni is not alone in being the victim of a rental scam. Read more about our research on online scams here. 

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