Craigslist Rentals – Scam or Bargain?

My girlfriend and I had some amazing vacations planned in 2020, all to be cancelled due to the Coronavirus, or what we loathingly call it – The Rona.  Our first vacation was a dream trip to Bali, Singapore and the Maldives, with a scheduled departure date of March 20^th.  Of course, everyone knows the world came to a screeching halt that week and everything closed, hotels, flights and even entire countries.  We had a second trip scheduled in July to go to New York to see some Broadway shows, and since New York is the world’s largest Covid-19 hotspot – that was cancelled as well.  We love to travel but take the health warnings seriously and haven’t even gone to a restaurant since they loosened some of the restrictions to keep ourselves and our family members who are in the affected category safe.  However, two months in the house with no end in sight was starting to wear on our nerves and we decided to rent a beach house that we could drive to, where we could go for a few days and take in some new scenery – and have something to look forward to. 

I started perusing beach houses in Florida and since June is prime vacation time it was hard to find something in our price range that fit our needs.  As I was getting frustrated because I couldn’t find anything, Deb said – “here look, there’s a bunch on Craigslist”.  I was very hesitant to look because I had heard horror stories about scams on Craigslist but there were a ton of ads that looked affordable.  Almost TOO affordable.  Many of the prices on Craigslist were much less than what I had seen on sites like Airbnb and VRBO – and that was the first red flag.  I decided to respond to two of the ads just in case I was worrying for nothing and hey, maybe the owner just really needed to fill the house that week.  The first was a beautiful house on the intracoastal in Hallandale Beach.  The ad showed that it had been posted online for two months. 

I received a response back almost immediately with a well written message that said:

Poster: Thanks for your enquiry on my rentals.  I have the dates available for your stay at the rate of $155/night.  Total stay is $775, $200 refundable security deposit, total rate is $975. 

Ok, so far so good – the response was well written and didn’t LOOK like it was being written by a scammer sitting in a small basement in some foreign country.  My curiosity was piqued so I responded with:

Me: So, I’ve never rented from Craig’s list before and I’m a little bit hesitant because I have heard horror stories – what is the process to rent and how does that work? 

Poster: Please you’ll need to provide the following information to be on the contract form, so as to proceed and secure the availability of the property.  There wasn’t much to go on here, and the phrasing did look a little odd.  But hey, maybe English wasn’t their first language, so I gave it another shot. 

Me: I’m asking how payment is taken etc. to determine how safe it is. 

Poster: I sent it to you already that you can make the payment through PayPal, zelle and cashapp.  I will issue the payment receipt to you as well.  You just come along with the printout of the contract form and payment receipt.  Hmmm… first of all you DIDN’T send that to me before and there is that odd phrasing again.  

Me: Do you have references of people who have rented before? I’d love to rent but am a little concerned about just sending Zelle from a Craigslist ad.

Poster: Message directly through my email address lauravacation23@gmail.com.  Here is the review below and my license.  The person then sent the following great reviews, and a copy of her license.

Now, I’m an investigator for a major telecommunications company – so investigating fraud is my forte!  First, I googled the email address I was given and couldn’t find anything online which would be odd for someone advertising vacation rentals.  Next, I took a line from the review, “lesli went above and beyond making sure we had everything we needed for my 7 month old  by setting up”, making sure to put it in quotations so that Google would look specifically for that line and not just sites that had all those words on them – and what do you know, I found the review on VRBO.  The pictures in the listing showed the same house that was being advertised on Craigslist.  Now, to be fair, sometimes people post on multiple vacation rental sites and if I were able to contact the owner and they told me that they had also made the post on Craigslist I would have been ok.  My next step was to look at the bookings for the home.  When I put in the same dates I gave the Craigslist poster, the price was $615 a night (a far cry from the $150 a night being offered on Craigslist) and all of the dates from now until August were booked.  We’ll call this big fat red flag number 2 lol! I then sent a message to the home owner on VRBO and she immediately responded back saying they had actually blocked off the next few months rentals due to Covid-19 and they had not posted on Craigslist, but that they constantly had problems with people using pictures of their home and fraudulently putting them on other sites.  So now I had confirmed it was fraud, but I went a step further and looked up the licensing for Relaxpro and called the owner, who stated HE had run into a lot of problems within the last month of someone giving out his licensing information for fraudulent rentals.  I sent him everything I had so he could pursue a criminal complaint.  The exact same thing happened with rental number two. 

Now, I’m not saying there are no good listings on Craigslist, I’m sure there are – but it appears the percentage of fraud is much higher than on Airbnb or VRBO, and at least when you book on those platforms you have a chance of getting your money back if there is an issue.  Anyone that fell for this scam would be completely out of luck, and it pains me to think of how many people out there actually would.  One of the home owners told me the story of a group of people who flew into town for a wedding, and when they arrived at her rental they realized it was occupied by someone else, and that they had been duped.  Personally, I think it takes too much work to ensure your rental is legitimate, so I’ll stick to Airbnb, VRBO or similar platforms, but if you do choose to try a Craigslist rental make sure you utilize the following tips:

• Beware of super-cheap rates on premium properties. Below-market rent can be the sign of a scam.  If all of the other renters in the same area with similar properties are hundreds of dollars more a night, there is usually something wrong. 

• Look at the pictures for the home being listed, and then do a reverse search in Google to see where else they are being shown. In my example above, I right clicked on the picture of the home in the Craigslist ad, and then chose “copy image address”.  Once I had the image address, I visited the Google images page (you can either go to the following URL or just google “google images” and it will bring you there).  Once on the google images page, I clicked on the camera in the search bar.  It brings up another search bar and here you can paste your URL and click on “search by image”.  Google will then bring up every site it can find that is using that same picture.  In my case there were three pages of sites that were using this same picture. 

• If you find the picture on a monitored platform (like Airbnb) you can contact the owner and see if the Craigslist ad is legitimate. If you see a huge price difference between what the owner is asking on all platforms but Craigslist, you can almost guarantee it is going to be a scam ad.

• If they give you an address, do a Google Streetview search to confirm it matches the house in the pictures and that it actually exists.

• Next Google the renter, if they give you an email address, google it to see if it is used on any of the other listings for the same property. See if you can find anything out about this person and try and contact them through other means.  In my example above, I could find no information on the poster, but was able to find contacts for both the legitimate homeowner and the person who was listed on the license to confirm they were not renting the home. 

• If the renter links to a site that appears to be Airbnb or another platform, make sure the site address is correct. Sometimes scammers will provide a site address that looks similar to the real thing, but it is designed to get your log in, password and credit card information.

• Ask the poster a lot of questions about the area, restaurants, attractions etc. If the ad is fraud the scammer may not be able to answer them.

• Ask for a rental agreement, typically full-time rentals will have a rental agreement because it protects both them and you. If they don’t have one, it might not be above board.

• Most scammers like cash transactions because they are more likely to get away with it. My fraudulent poster wanted me to use Venmo, Paypal or Cashapp. Always use a credit card if possible so that if there is an issue you can dispute it with your bank, and never pay or message outside of a site’s platform so that there is a record of your transactions. 

• Many scammers ask for a high deposit because that is the amount they are going to steal from you. (Obviously when you show up and there is no home to rent, you won’t be paying the rest).   Research the local deposit laws, if a person is asking you to pay more than they are legally allowed to, this is a red flag. 

• Trust your gut … if something seems off or too good to be true – it probably is.

Let me know about your experiences with Craigslist – Good or Bad!