Renting someone else’s home out to an unsuspecting sincere prospective tenant just to steal the deposit money is another new low.

Actually, this happened to a coworker in our Cary Keller Williams Realty office.  We found her rental home listed on Craigslist where the scammer had copied and pasted the photo from Rent.com.

The email address was apparently real: her full name and a yahoo email address.  And when she was painting at the house in Raleigh, and cleaning up the yard, she noticed that people were driving by slowly and checking the place out.

Then I emailed her the link to the Craigslist scam, and she got the creeps.  Several of us in the office flagged the ad and it was down in a few more minutes.

But it was the same scam as described in the WRAL story above.  Keys in Africa.  Send money.  Will send keys.  It’s been going on a while.  As far as we know, no one bit on the fraud, as no one came forward claiming to have rented the home.