Renters Get Swindled and Scammed
Monday, Jun 29, 2009
Renters Get Swindled and Scammed
By TERI KARUSH ROGERS | June 28, 2009
IN New York City, the rental market can seem a lot like the black market. Renters are accustomed to feeling hustled, fleeced, and generally at the mercy of predatory forces beyond their control — and that’s when everything goes O.K.
In this forest of stunted expectations, it can be tough to distinguish the sharp-elbowed fauna from the truly corrupt, a circumstance that has long enabled scam artists to thrive here. This year, moreover, the busy spring-summer rental season is unfolding in a time of falling rental prices, which means too-good-to-be-true deals — the con artist’s calling card — seem more credible than they have in recent years.
“We deal with customers all day long who think the market is 60 percent off when it’s really 15 to 20 percent, depending on the location,” said Gary Malin, the president of Citi Habitats. “Those are the types of people who are susceptible to scams. Whereas when you’re in a very strong market and hearing that prices are escalating and vacancies are hard to find, people are more leery.”
One of the most pervasive scams is a keys-for-cash gambit. Carried out online where almost all rental transactions begin these days, this ploy separates would-be renters from their money before they so much as set foot inside a dwelling. In this scheme, information and pictures from legitimate rental or sales listings are lifted from other sites and reposted under another name at an eye-poppingly low rent.
Read entire article here.
|
