“It makes you very vigilant, very suspicious,” Jenna said.
Jenna has been staying with a friend for the past few months. She lost thousands of dollars after the house she was supposed to rent in March turned out to be a scam.
This text is the translation of an article from CTV News.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I was supposed to move in in a week or two. I had called all the public services to change everything, I had changed my address, everything had been organized, the movers, etc.”
The place she found was listed on Facebook Marketplace in Findlay Creek. But it had been created by a scammer using information from a real listing.
She went to see him in person, filled out a rental application with the scammer unknowingly, and sent the money to someone who wasn’t legitimately renting the property, and it disappeared.
“They seem to be middlemen,” says Jenna. “The scammer poses as the potential tenant to the agent and the scammer poses as the agent.”
Several people have told us similar stories. They have all seen rental properties in person, thinking they were dealing with a real agent.
All received emails signed Home Run Realty, which is a real company, but the emails in question were fake.
“I’m shocked at how brazen they are,” said Amber Sauve, a real estate agent with Keller Williams Integrity Realty.
She explains that her identity was recently stolen on one of her listings and that the person who did the impersonation sent potential tenants to her open house and tried to get them to pay their deposit.
“We found out later, through one of the potential tenants who contacted me to confirm that he had never spoken to me, that they had spoofed my emails and used my name, and that they had just asked him for a deposit,” she listed. “He was seven minutes away from sending the deposit.”
Many of the properties originally listed on Realtor.ca appear on Facebook profiles such as Bsv Liberty, which has since been deleted.
But they don’t just collect money, they also collect personal data such as Social Security numbers and financial information from fake rental contracts.
“We’re sorry this happened,” said Marvin Alexander, president of Keller Williams Integrity Realty. “It’s certainly not our fault, but we’re going to do everything we can to make our real estate agents, our agents and other brokerages aware of what’s going on. We have to work together and do our best to protect the public.”
As for Jenna, she’s a single mother who lost $7,200 after sending in three months’ rent. The family started a GoFundMe page to support Jenna.
