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Comment by rosywoozlechan | Hacker News Reader

I rent a couple of properties out in the bay area and up until this year I've always relied on craigslist to get new tenants, but this year we tried out Zillow and we got tons of applicants, and the whole application process including vetting and setting up a lease and everything was done through Zillow. On the other hand someone noticed our Zillow listing and created a fraudulent listing of my property on Craigslist. I'm pretty much never going back to Craigslist. Apartments.com is also good for creating leases and managing properties, but Zillow seems to be the place to get high quality tenants.

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As far as I have been able to determine, literally 100% of the rental listings in Berkeley, CA on Craigslist are fake. They take MLS descriptions and photos of properties and repost those on CL as rentals with unrealistically low prices. The postings are identity theft scams. They want you to "apply" to rent these properties that don't exist.

The real problem for me is that the elected officials and even sometimes professional staff of the city will point to Craigslist as inventory of low-priced housing, but it's totally fake so their impression is inaccurate.

Did Zillow charge for this service? You mentioned "vetting" - does that include background and credit checks?

Yes, I think the prospective applicants pay for the background checks and then they are submitted for all the places they apply on Zillow. We can pay for them also. It includes a criminal check and a credit score check.

Craigslist is the only thing I have ever needed to rent out our condo for more than a decade. Long may it live! I'll also plug ezLandlordForms for everything else, inc. applications and background checks and contracts and yada yada.

Thanks for sharing. I’m about to rent out a house so this helps a lot.

One thing I don’t get is why someone else would copy your listing? Do they somehow get a slice of the pie if a respondent rents?

> One thing I don’t get is why someone else would copy your listing? Do they somehow get a slice of the pie if a respondent rents?

Usually this is a scam. You advertise someone else's vacant property, break in to conduct tenant tours, collect fees/deposits/first month's rent, then bail.

Well that’s just evil. I never gave that possibility a thought.

I tried to find a succinct name for this scheme but failed. I did find a blog where a retired attorney discusses this and some variations on it (and learned something new in the process: pulling this stunt on multiple prospective tenants at the same time makes this a hell of a lot more lucrative):

https://livingstingy.blogspot.com/2017/07/house-rental-scams...

Excellent article, thank you. And you're right, this scam needs a name.

Basically financial identity theft and fraud combined with breaking and entering — there’s no need to makeup new names for simple combinations of crimes.

Long list for crimes people commit using Craigslist. Another similar one is for an attacker to post saying your moving of the country, out of town, already removed everything you’re not taking, but asked neighbor to leave the door open and anything in house is free to take; then they simply know when you’re away, pick the lock, leave the door open, and post the listing. Unknowing strangers rob you OR have a plausible explanation of why they are robbing you.

Interesting. Haven't seen that one, but it's reminiscent of the "revenge" personals where you solicit randos to randomly drop in on your [ex] to fulfill their supposed rape fantasy.

> no need to makeup new names for simple combinations of crimes

Fraud schemes are sophisticated and the better ones are not easily understood (by victims, investigators and jurors alike). It may be unnecessary/unconventional but I find it useful to reduce the complexity of schemes to a buzzword with a common meaning that anybody can reference without ambiguity. Gets it into the popular vernacular-- everybody knows to be wary of "catfishing" without having to explain it.

From the crimes they comprise to their implementation, it's function definitions all the way down: a concise, reusable reference that avoids repeat articulation of a more-complex set of behaviors :)

If you really believe calling something 419 scam, Nigerian prince scam, or advance-fee scam will help reduce crime, have bag of money with your name on it just waiting for you to tell me where to send it.

Literally had a friend once ask me how to wire money, asked why, they made me promise not to tell anyone, and then showed me scammer email. I told them I would show them how and got lucky and within few clicks tracked scammer down to a cafe in Nigeria. Told scammer I would leave them alone if they told my friend the truth and they did. Friend got mad at me told me I chased they away, and found out a week later they wired the scammer money.

Yes, some scams are complex, but are not. Highly doubt telling people not to get catfished never helped anyone. If the advice of beware of something that sounds to good to be true do not help someone, giving it a fancy name for sure will not.

It's also common for them to say that this apartment has "just been rented," and then show them a completely different apartment for their clients. Usually these apartments are both worse and more expensive.

Most of the similar scams I've seen don't involve entering and showing the property, or being even anywhere near it. A common style is to post a duplicated listing on Craigslist (it may be a house currently on the market, but often is an inactive listing on Zillow - they just need an address and matching photos) with a story written in a style that would be familiar to scam aficionados. The owner is a god-fearing good person who just wants their house to be safe while they are overseas on missionary work or in the military, and they're willing to rent it to the right people for a generous below market rate. Kindly do this-or-that, god bless you, etc. They request a sum of money, making it enticing by naming a rate 3/4 of what would be going rent for the property, and say they'll mail the key.

I don't think we ever had break ins, but in our small house near the beach in San Diego, my wife and I regularly had to break it to people that they were not moving in next morning/weekend/week/month, and that they had been scammed. Don't know how much they were paying in.

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