Hey everyone,

I've been contacted twice now by people who have moved to Spain, and that is their opening two emails about the apartment. They've even attached their passport and photos to get to know them more.

Is this just due to German Bureaucracy, or is this a well-known scam?

by Klor204

26 comments

  3. Well known scam. Passport is from someone else they scammed.

  5. 100% scam. You NEVER need to pay before you signed anything or watched the apartment. Never ever. Also very crazy to rent something but pay ‘booking’?? Why would you do this. 1000000% scam. Try to report it to authorities.

  6. > They’ve even attached their passport and photos

    For the love of Cthulhu, how do people keep falling for this?

    They have attached a picture of a passport and some photos, and written “trust me bro this is definitely me”.

    You have zero evidence that the passport is genuine, and zero evidence that the passport, even if genuine, has any relation to the person who wrote “trust me bro this is definitely me”.

  8. It has more red flags per square meter than the soviet union.

  10. I can’t believe this scam isn’t better known, I know about it since more than 15 years, and not in Germany

  11. I saw the blue booking.com link and knew it was a scam before reading anything else in the image or post.

  12. this is always a scam!! Landlords don’t need your passport

  13. Great, had the same conversation when I looked for an appartment. He wanted to give me the flat after just one email.:D

    Do yourself a favor, delete this guy. This is a scam.

  15. It’s a scam. Then they proceed to ask you for your passport photo ‘to verify you are also real’, and then they have more passport pictures to send to the next victim.

  16. SCAM, you will be asked to send money to Spain for the first rent and security deposit and then never hear anything form them again. Or vene better give the money in cash to a “trusted friend” wo will meet you to give you the keys.

    For the fun of it: Ask them to do a Zoom Call and show the ID card in the call as *”everyone knows there are a lot of ID pictures in circulation on the web.”* and see how fast thy vanish

  17. !housing

    Read those two Wiki pages. This *exact* scam is described there, in great detail.

    What would “German Bureaucracy” have to do with anything?

  19. I once kept talking to them to see how it ends. They send you a phishing link at the end. For me it was Airbnb phishing link.
    Ofc he asked for my passport , i made a quick fake one and send it to him , he was so thrilled. At the end he figured it after i kept telling him i sent the money and asked him to send it back lol.

  20. you don’t have to censor any names. They aren’t real anyway

  23. I once had someone like that claiming they are Spanish and went back to Spain after divorce. When I responded in Spanish, they kept writing in German to me. I’m puzzled how this scam is still going on – I guess there are unfortunately still some poor desperate souls that get scammed…

  24. I get the need-to-rent-desperation… but in Germany, if anyone goes out of their way to FACILITATE the rental process… you know.

  25. The best known scam around these parts, how do people still fall for it

  26. How can it be a scam? They like hiking! A completely normal thing to inform a future tenant about. You should ask them whether they’re a petroleum engineer. That’s how you really know they’re legit.

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