The 32-year-old single mother felt relieved. Although she had to leave her YWCA safe house for survivors of domestic violence, she found an affordable apartment in Vancouver where she could live with her two children.
“It’s perfect,” she thought. The new place was spacious, with two bedrooms, 1½ baths and a little patio where her kids could play.
“I’ll take it,” she said to the man on the phone giving her a tour. She signed a lease.
But on the day she was scheduled to move in, the keycode the man gave her didn’t work anymore. The man, who she now realized impersonated the management company, was unreachable. Her $1,500 security deposit and fees? Gone.
GET HELP
If you’ve been scammed, report it to your local law enforcement and file a complaint at www.ic3.gov.
If you’re facing domestic violence, call YWCA 24-hour Crisis Hotline for local calls at 360-695-0501.
The woman, whom The Columbian is not naming because she’s fleeing domestic violence, is just one victim among many hit by a wave of rental scams since the pandemic, according to tenant advocates, lawyers and law enforcement. Scammers have taken advantage of the housing crisis by modifying legitimate rental ads and listing them at a lower cost to target desperate people jumping at the chance to obtain stable housing, they say.
“If I had a little bit more time to think about it, maybe I would have seen the red flags,” the woman said. “But I was in a hurry.”
Too affordable to be true
The woman said she fled her former home with her children due to domestic violence, and she fears for the safety of herself and her children if they’re forced to sleep on the streets.
As a full-time mother with little education, the woman subsists on Social Security Disability Insurance payments. So when she saw an apartment on Craigslist for $995, she immediately responded. She called the number at the bottom of the listing and spoke with a man who said his name was Robert Nelson — a combination of names associated with the real property management company, Nelson Family Properties.
She refused to give him any money before taking a tour, aware of how often renters like herself are scammed by too-good-to-be-true listings. No problem, he said.
When she arrived, there was a lockbox on the door.
“He asks me to read the barcode on the bottom of a lockbox tool, which I do, and then he gives me the lockbox code,” she said.
Nelson Family Properties and the owner of the apartment, Canyon Furniture, did not respond to requests for comment or inquiries about how the scammer may have known the code.
The woman signed an eight-page lease, paid him the security deposit and fees through CashApp and packed her family’s possessions. She and her children would never have to live in a shelter again, she thought. But when they returned later that night, they couldn’t get into the apartment. Their hope of moving forward evaporated.
A multistate venture
The woman gave The Columbian the phone number of the man who spoke to her. She couldn’t reach him again after sending the funds. The Columbian left a message inquiring about a listing. The call was returned, apparently from a New York phone number.
“Hello? Is this Robert?” I asked. After a pause, a man with a slight accent replied, “Yes.”
I told him I was interested in one of the apartments he listed and asked if it was still available. He believed I was responding to a listing in California.
“Would you be able to go to the place today … in the next two hours?”
I hadn’t asked for a tour. I inquired whether he had any listings in Vancouver instead, and he said no, but he could connect me with another owner.
“What’s your budget in Washington for you?” he asked.
I told him I couldn’t afford anything higher than $1,200.
“That’s fine,” he said. “You’d have to pay like the first month and the security deposit.”
At this time, I explained that I was a reporter, and I knew he was a scammer. I asked if he wanted to provide a comment on his scams for the article.
“What do you want to know?”
“How long have you been scamming people?” I asked.
He hung up.
Targeting vulnerable
Terri Anderson, interim executive director of the Tenant’s Union of Washington State, said fraudulent rental listings target low-income renters. Several of her clients, many of them homeless and desperate for housing, have fallen for similar scams, she said.
“It is very intentionally targeting the most vulnerable people during a housing crisis. I just can’t think of anything more cruel than that,” Anderson said.
She noticed an uptick in fraudulent listings starting during the pandemic in conjunction with the rising cost of housing.
“It really did start with COVID. If we got them before that, they were very rare,” she said.
The affordable housing crisis has exacerbated the issue of rental scams, she said, since prospective tenants are competing for a small number of rentals.
Experts say Clark County needs to develop more than 50,000 units of low-income housing by 2044 to keep up with the state’s projected housing needs.
Anderson said she’s also had Washington landlords reach out to her about fraudulent rental listings in which scammers collect application fees with no intention of responding.
Sue Denfeld, president of the Clark County Rental Association, said fraudulent rental listings have become more of a problem for mom-and-pop landlords over the past decade.
Listings on sites such as Craigslist are especially vulnerable to scams, she said. Scammers rip the photos off other listings and price them 30 to 40 percent lower, she said.
“Craigslist has always been a problem, but we still use it due to the volume of traffic,” Denfeld said.
She recalls her own experience with a rental scam recently. She was completing a move-in at a property when she heard someone trying to use a key at the front door.
“I asked what they were doing, and they said that they were going to move into this property. She had sent $2,500 to a contact for a security deposit and was sent the keys. The keys did not work,” Denfeld said.
At first, the woman refused to believe she had been scammed and demanded Denfeld pay her back the security deposit.
“I finally got her to see the light and that she had paid monies to a scammer,” she said.
Denfeld recommends prospective tenants research a property address on more than one website to look for duplicates and call both parties to verify the rental information.
Pitfall of remote tours
Advocates and tenant lawyers say fraudulent rental listings swelled during the pandemic, when remote tours and interactions became more common. However, many landlords kept the business model afterward.
“I think it’s probably popular because it’s low cost,” said Edmund Witter, managing attorney for the Seattle-based Housing Justice Project. “There’s not a lot of personnel involved.”
American Homes 4 Rent, for example, is a company that allows prospective tenants to tour rentals on their own by going through the “let yourself in” process. By entering some identification, someone can receive the key to a lockbox on the door.
“That, obviously, can be exploited … if there’s somebody who gets the code and then you just start doing this on your own,” Witter said.
There are plenty of news stories about scams exploiting American Homes 4 Rent’s remote business model.
“There is a negligence issue here,” Witter said. “When you basically put something out there, you know people are getting taken advantage of … you have not taken reasonable steps to prevent it.”
American Homes 4 Rent now posts “Fraud Alert” signs on its rentals explaining it does not advertise properties anywhere besides its website. One of the rentals The Columbian visited had one of these signs held up with two strips of tape that could easily be ripped off.
Witter said he’s represented many clients across Washington who moved into rentals after falling for one of these scams and going through a fraudulent middleman. After the landlord finds out they’re living there illegally, although because they were victimized, the tenants face eviction and a stain on their rental record.
“I think more business models are essentially just picking up what other industries are doing — just modernizing, reducing costs, reducing labor,” Witter said. “And this is why it’s popular, why it still persists despite this incidence of scams.”
Small crimes add up
Although the local woman who lost $1,500 reported the incident to the Vancouver Police Department, she doesn’t expect officers will find the scammer. However, Special Agent Ethan Via with the FBI’s Seattle Office said she did the right thing.
People should also report instances of rental fraud to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov, he said.
People rarely report fraud because it can feel embarrassing, but each report can build into larger investigations, Via said. The FBI gets involved with rental scams when criminals steal a lot of money or are part of organized crime.
“If they’re hitting your victim, I bet there are victims here in Seattle, all over the state, all over the country, and if we can connect these incidents to a ring of people, then instead of a one-victim, $1,500 case, now we’re talking about 100 victim case with over a million dollars in loss,” Via said. “That’s how we turn these small cases into big cases that the FBI can actually investigate and hold people accountable for what they’re doing to people.”
Via said the woman in this particular case did a lot of things right, but he recommends insisting on face-to-face interactions and paying through a credit card, which allows a user to file a complaint about a fraudulent transaction.
Scammers often ask their victims to pay them through wire transfers, apps like CashApp and Venmo, or cryptocurrency, he said, where it’s harder to cancel transactions.
Urgency is also a red flag, he said.
“They’re always pushing you to do things really quickly because they want you to act without thinking, because they’re running out of time to pull off their fraud,” Via said.
The woman has the same advice. Despite the fact she needed housing soon, she wishes had slowed down. She might have kept her savings.
“Don’t give into, ‘Hey, this has to happen right now’ kind of situations. If they’re urging you to give them money right away, just don’t do it,” she said.
Unlike many victims of scams, the woman was lucky. CashApp refunded the money she lost. But she still can’t find an apartment she can afford. Move-in costs are often thousands of dollars.
She started a GoFundMe webpage to raise money for a new home but fears unsheltered homelessness soon. Every shelter she’s called is full, she said.
She doesn’t understand how someone could know what she was going through and hurt her further, she said.
“I was desperate, and he knew that,” she said. “I told him I had kids … and he still took advantage of my weaknesses.”
