Posted Aug 27, 2021, 2:52 PM
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Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Victoria, BC, Canada
Posts: 5,812
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This is Victoria but is happening everywhere. Mrs. West is a property manager and came across an online ad Tuesday for a very roomy apartment renting for $1,200. With school starting in days students are past desperate and the situation in Victoria now is frantic. We smelled a scam right away. Something was off about the photos, we couldn't quite put our finger on it but when we requested a video it all came together: the weird appliances, air conditioner and the clincher was the round Euro electrical outlets. This was definitely not a Saanich home.
She reported the ad but knew it was probably on multiple sites. She contacted one respondent on Facebook, a student from Chile who told us he was just about to send the scammer a deposit. Next she drove to the nearby Gordon Head house whose address was used in the ad in order to inform the homeowner their property information was being used to dupe people and to be aware that anyone dropping by to look is being scammed.
We messaged an application to the scammer and got a rental agreement by email. Now we had an email address which the Canada fraud website told us is helpful in stopping the scam.
The scammer then pressured us to send a deposit by e-transfer. Mrs. West replied that we don't have e-transfer so we put the deposit in cash in an envelope and put it through the mailbox of the house.
It didn't stop him but we wasted a lot of his time and killed one of his email addresses. Fun!
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