New kind of scam

Wifey's son is looking for a rental house, so of course she has to help. She finds a great deal on a waterfront house, direct ocean access, in a really nice are, for 900.00 a month. Deal of the century!! She e-mails, gets back a response that the owner had to quickly return to West Africa, that they will be returning in a few years, and basically just want somebody to take care of the house. Sounds reasonable, no? Well, the interesting thing is, there is no way to see the interior, as he has the keys, so just send 1900.00 and he will send the keys and documents. Wife, being the suspicious type, checks all kinds of public records, finds out that the house is an estate sale by a legitimate Ft. Lauderdale broker, who will rent it for 2200.00 per month. Phone number for the scammer is a Nigeria area code. They are getting smarter.

There taking it even further than that. They find a house in foreclosure, mow the lawn, rekey the locks, and run an ad. they collect 1st, last, and security.

renters move in, then the legitimate bank agent or real estate people show up, and tell em to get out... Im sure it makes for a real bad day.

Anything that starts with someone needing to be in a different country in a hurry is always a scam. On the internet if it sounds too good to be true, it is!

I watched that Intervention TV show on Discovery last night. They had some guy who was addicted to various drugs plus he was bipolar, and on top of all that he believed all the scam emails he got from Nigeria....they said he had sent them over $600,000 by the time his family was able to convince him to go to treatment.

I own a mortgage company and I had a Nigerian group try to buy a home using several foreclosed homes as a previous addresses and also use them as income from fake rental contracts. They know FHA foreclosures have to go thru a long process so they just use the address and go by daily to pick up the mail.

This group had a girlfriend in one state who worked with a bank filling out verifications of Deposit and a different girlfriend in another state doing employment verifications.

They also worked some sort of scam on cars.

It was the first and only time I've been wired for sound by the FBI, local sheriffs office, State Police and several police departments. The law enforcement guys played like they were customers and employees while the Nigerians entered my office and gave me fake documentation. They arrested them the next day.

Interestingly enough even tho mortgage fruad was a federal offense, they got deported over their car dealings. Since the Nigerian scams are condoned by the Nigerian government. Condoned is too weak a word, these scams are part of the national income. But since these guys were good they were back into the U.S. within 8 weeks.

As a locksmith, I've seen a bunch of this kind of thing. It's often heart breaking. The tenant holds some of the blame for believing in something they knew was be too good to be true. People in dire straits will often fall for the first scam that comes along, out of desperation, and these jackals are waiting there for them. In my business, we learned to ask certain questions to judge whether a home actually belonged to somebody asking for work done. After a short while, one gets a sixth sense about it, but the poor tenant is still out on the street. Like I said.. it's sometimes very sad.

Interesting that we have not gotten any response from the scammer or the real estate guy.

What gets me is that these guys are so transparent, I have no idea as to how anyone would fall for them.

When I was renting rooms, a few Nigerian scammers tried to run scams on me with no luck. The check that they sent was obviously fake, the addresses they used as references didn't match up. Even the e-mail communications sent were terrible.

Having seen how these guys work, I am baffled anyone falls for them.

BTW, I saw a Chris Hanson special not too long ago, dealing with scammers.

Here ya go

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17713446

Cojones grandes on that reporter. I'm sure he had back up close by, but that could well have gone badly.