Hawaii’s Better Business Burea and the Honolulu Board of Realtors issued a joint warning concerning a scam that has been making the rounds on Craigslist’s Hawaii real estate section lately.
The scammer will find a property for sale using a real estate search engine like hicentral.com or Prudential Locations Real Estate Search. They copy the details of a property into a craigslist ad, and advertise the property for rent well below market. When a prospective victim replies to the ad, they are told the owner is out of town, and they need to wire the deposit to the out of state address and then they will be shipped the keys. The victim wires the money and never receives the keys.
If you are using craigslist to find rentals, never wire money for the deposit, meet your prospective landlord in person and make sure you have a signed rental agreement.
As usual, if it sounds too good to be true, it probaly is.
July 16th, 2008 at 5:35 am
This is definitely a “red alert”. I’ve seen scams like this take place with unsuspecting people and they ultimately loose everything they gave. It’s just a few that give places like Craigslist a bad name, albeit i’ve seen a lot of bad coming out of this site. =o(
July 29th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Craigslist stuff can be very shadey. Great resource, but be very careful! & Use your common sense.
October 17th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
i went to this site to check out places to stay at…. and it was a scam artist whose tricking people into paying the first months rent and security deposit… lucky thing i told my husband to go check out the place before we make any money transaction….. so he did and when he went there to the place were suppose to buy…. it didnt even exist…. and we looked it up on google map…. it was showing us that the place of the address is in the middle of the jungle…. so i warned you guys if your going to look for a place google craigslist thats a real site to go to…. to look for a place to stay…. or rent out……