Too Good to be True? Then Beware!

My heart pounded as I read an e-mail from a Nigerian prince who inherited $20 million from his father and would like to know if I could help him invest in U.S. real estate. I could not believe my good fortune — even though I was a brand new Realtor, he was able to find and entrust me with such an important investment!

However, after I recovered from that excitement, I quickly realized it just might be a scam. Those e-mails have since become an automatic "DELETE."

As a Realtor with a background in information technology project management, I started using online resources to reach wider audience for my clients from the beginning of my real estate career years ago. Craigslist is one of the many online tools I use.

The good thing about Craigslist is that it is free; you can post anonymously and it reaches a wide audience. This means great exposure for the products you want to promote.  But these same qualities also mean criminals can use Craigslist to take advantage of unsuspected consumers.

One thing people need to understand is that Craigslist does not actively monitor the contents online, even with the fraud/spam report buttons we can use. It takes a lot of effort to get a listing deleted. Cautions should be taken when you use Craigslist both to advertise and to search for homes, merchandizes or services to purchase or use.

The above scam is aimed at Realtors, which I can easily handle. However, I also encountered another scam where consumers can easily fall into: a house is posted for a very low rent to entice anxious renters to wire funds and give out their personal/financial information.

I received a few calls one morning about two years ago on a nice listing I had in the Gerstle Park area of San Rafael. They wondered if the house was for rent and if they could see the house.

I found out that a scammer took the description of my listing and posted it as a rental for a ridiculously low rent. The callers got suspicious when they went to the house and saw the "For Sale" sign. One contacted the scammer, expressed interest and received an e-mail back. The scammer said he was out of country with his kids and need to rent the house out. He asked the prospective renter to send a deposit and their personal and financial information so they can get this going.

I tried my very best to explain that when something is too good to be true, it’s probably not true.  I could sense the big disappointment in their voices after they found out the house was not for rent.

After some research, I found that in this specific case, there is a volunteer group on Craigslist that monitors and reports similar scams.  One person sent me the correspondence she received and I was able to post that on Craigslist and reported it to the authorities. Since there is a volunteer monitoring group involved, the offending post was removed fairly quickly.

I am very surprised to find that people can be taken advantage of with something that’s so obviously impossible.  A couple important things to keep in mind when conducting business on Internet:

1) When something is too good to be true, it’s probably not true

2) NEVER give personal information to strangers without checking their credentials – contact information, social security number, bank and credit card information, etc.