Landlords targeted by overpayment scammers

Watching the NBC-24 Toledo 11:00 newscast last night, a segment on the waning year's most widely perpetrated scams definitely caught my ear.

That's because apparently the 10th most popular scam of 2006 was one that may continue to target the property owners who offer their listings for prospective tenants to browse at www.easyrentcheck.com -- or at any other online rental vacancy search site for that matter.

Because NBC-24 doesn't yet have the story on their website, I went looking for a similar recent story from another news outlet. Sure enough Alberta, Canada's Business Edge News didn't let me down and writer Brock Ketcham details the scam and others like it here in an article published last week.

The scam begins with an e-mail to a property owner advertising an available apartment or house for rent. The person e-mailing the property owner claims to be interested in the unit but there are a few catches.

The "prospective tenant" discloses that he or she is currently living outside of the United States, and will be transferred by his or her company to the city in which the apartment or house is available. Scammers say the company will issue one large international check or money order meant to cover all the "prospective tenant's" moving expenses and housing costs. What scammers will want you to do is cash the check or money order and wire back to them the excess beyond what is needed for rent and application fees.

This might sound like a good deal at first, particularly if the person inquiring about a rental unit offers to pay for an entire year's rent up front, which many do.

But I'm going to go out on a limb -- though I feel confident that it's a pretty structurally sound one -- and state that in 100 percent of these cases, the check or money order is a fraud.

Should you actually cash a fraudulent check or money order and wire any overpayment back to the sender, you'll be out thousands of dollars. Most bank tellers, and even their supervisors, cannot tell right away that a check or money order, particularly one not printed or authorized in the United States, is a fraud. It can take days or even several weeks for the document to be declared fraudulent and bounce in your account; and by that time, the original sender will be long gone and virtually untrackable. Any money you deposited into your own account from the fraudulent check or money order will be summarily reclaimed by the bank, as it never actually existed in the first place -- and you'll owe your bank in the amount of whatever the "overpayment" was that you wired back to the original sender.

Any website and its users are open targets for scammers. Scammers are a crafty lot, and there is really no way to entirely stop them. Website administrators and Internet users can, however, take precautions.

When we first went live with www.easyrentcheck.com more than a year ago, our company e-mail addresses were almost immediately targeted by exactly the type of scam described above, and since then we've tried to take steps to discourage scammers from targeting our users.

The first, and most important, thing we wanted to do was educate our site visitors about Internet scams. While this blog post is a timely reminder, we did many months ago begin to run a series of banner ads on our site which aimed to make our users more savvy about scams. We also hoped that the appearance of ads on our site would let scammers trolling the site for victims know they weren't dealing with uninformed property owners.

You can see our most current ad here; clicking it links to here, where there are descriptions of different varieties of fake check scams. (I tried to post the image, but Blogger for some reason will not let me do it, perhaps because it is an animated .gif.)

The second thing we did was to geographically tailor our site advertising with Google, to make it just a bit less likely that international web users would find our site. Of course, anyone anywhere can find any site online if they know where to look for it, but we have elected not to make it any easier by configuring our Google-based advertising to only show up for Internet users in and around Northwest Ohio.

We at www.easyrentcheck.com are always looking for new and affordable ways to protect our users from falling victims to scammers. But we can't do it alone! When you advertise your property on our site, please be savvy about it. We advise all our landlords to only accept queries from local applicants and rental payments only in American currency, preferably only U.S.-issued money orders or checks from local banks.