The house seemed like a dream come true. A three-bedroom beachfront paradise, it was only a short walk away from fine food and shopping in downtown Montauk, the Craigslist ad crooned.
Dave Benthal, a 28-year-old Jamesport native, thought it would be the perfect place to host his friend’s bachelor party for a weekend this June.
“It fit all of our needs,” Benthal said. “I was so relieved. Everything else in the area had already filled up.”
The creator of the ad identified himself as Allen Huddleston. Huddleston’s emails and phone calls were very professional. He spoke proper English with good grammar, and he had “very clear requirements” of Benthal and his friends.
There was little indication that Benthal was about to be scammed out of more than $1,000.
Websites like Craigslist have made it easier for people to rent houses, sell cars and find jobs. But they’ve also given scammers a bigger pool of potential victims than ever before.
Scammers often advertise homes at extremely low rates online alongside real listings, making young adults working low-income jobs a primary target. After luring in an unsuspecting renter, scammers will often claim they are out of town, or unable to meet in person before they need the deposit – which needs to be sent as soon as possible in order to nail down the deal.
That’s exactly what happened to Benthal. Since the rental was only a month away, he was told that if he didn’t get the check to Huddleston as quickly as he could, he would lose the weekend.
And when he learned that Huddleston lived in California, Benthal wasn’t alarmed. An experience renter, Benthal has done long-term leases with other out-of-state homeowners in the past.
“If I was looking at something more permanent, I would have needed to see the house before I put down a payment,” Benthal said. “But I wanted it for next month, and everything else was filling up. I definitely felt the pressure.”
Local police departments and federal agencies don’t keep official statistics on rental scams, but they are only getting more popular as more renters turn to websites like Craigslist instead of traditional newspaper classifieds.
And as more homeowners advertise their houses for rent online, scammers have more and more listings to steal information and photos from. Increasingly, scammers are populating their listings with details from real rental ads to make them seem more legitimate.
Benthal’s beachfront paradise, for example, is actually a real house that is advertised on another vacation rental website, where the real homeowner, Kelly Mason, had already booked up the house for the entire summer – at three times the rate Benthal had been advertised.
“We’ve had emails from at least a dozen people asking about Craiglist ads,” Mason said today. “I tell them we’ve never advertised on Craiglist.”
Mason has been renting out the house as a summer vacation home for three years, but it was only this February when she was first contacted by scam victims. Pictures and other details about the house, including its address, were stolen from her own listing and advertised on Craigslist for much lower rates.
That’s part of what makes the scam so tricky to catch. “He gave me a real address that I looked up on Google,” Benthal said. “It matched the pictures that he sent me. It made me feel a lot more comfortable.”
Mason knows at least three other homeowners in Montauk who have also had their homes advertised as rentals on Craiglist by scammers.
After going to the East Hampton Town Police Department, however, Mason was told there wasn’t very much the police could do.
“They basically told me they’d file a report, but that these online scammers are virtually impossible to catch,” she said.
That’s because scammers often use fake names, auto-generated email addresses and internet phone numbers. They might request payment through methods that are nearly impossible to cancel or trace, such as wire transfers or cashier’s checks.
Like many other young adults today, Benthal is much less familiar with checkbooks than other forms of payment. So when Huddleston asked him to send a $1,175 cashier’s check to an address in California, Benthal didn’t realize he was sending something that he couldn’t cancel.
Predictably, phone calls and emails to the man Benthal had been communicating with have gone unanswered ever since.
“Hopefully other young people can learn from my experience,” Benthal said.
He still hasn’t found a home for his friend’s bachelor party this summer, but he says he will be looking at more reputable sources than Craigslist from now on.
“It’s much safer to go through legitimate websites like Airbnb, where there’s a third party controlling the money,” he said. “I learned my lesson.”
So what steps can you take not to become a victim of a rental scam?
- Be very wary owners who claim they’re out of the country, or even out of state.
- Insist on taking a tour of the property before you put any money down.
- Don’t fill out a rental application before you’ve seen the property. Personal information on rental applications can be used for identity theft.
- Pay attention to the cost of nearby properties. Prices that seem like a steal for the area are more likely to be a scammer trying to steal your money.
- And never, ever send money to someone without getting a lease and making sure the recipient has a legal right to rent the property.
“If it looks like it’s too good to be true,” Mason said, “it probably is.”