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. 

Thursday, the crowd was immediately apparent, even before I opened the Salisbury Street Entrance door of the Wake County Courthouse.  ACORN demonstrators were present with a couple of banner signs and their “Save Our Homes” message.  They had had the foresight to tip off the folks at Raleigh’s WRAL-TV, who responded by delegating a cameraman to tape the proceedings.

There were more ACORN folks there than there were bidders or observers, and I managed to stumble into camera range and show up on the WRAL-TV news video.  Briefly, on the left as the woman paralegal cried one of the auctions.  The tall guy with the red necktie tossed up over his shoulder.  Making my mark in current events.

Again, as is common, all properties that were auctioned went to the 1st lienholder, with several postponements.  I hope that the postponements are successful efforts for folks to keep their homes, or to succeed in short sales, and to avoid foreclosure.