I’m looking for a place in Munich and saw an ad on Facebook about this apartment that just looked too good to be true (aesthetics, price, and location). I received the email shown on the picture, which made it clear to me that it has to be a scam, especially regarding the “TripAdvisor representative”. It obviously all sounds very shady and I have no intentions of moving forward with the process, but I still cannot figure out the scheme to scam someone this way, if after all I will be meeting with someone.
I alsp did some digging, and tbh I probably overdid myself a little by looking up so much stuff, when it’s obviously a scam, but I just wanted to see how much I could find.
1. The one advertising the apartment was a woman, who also has other properties listed on five different major German cities (one on each city). All apparently very good deals (red flag).
2. One of the pictures of the apartment that they sent me is of the view from one window, with a green building across the street. I looked up the address on Google Maps, and at least that matched, but I figured the just stole the photos from a real advertisement of the place. The photos also looked quite professional.
3. Finally, as you can see, the email if from a Dr. Jakob Schmidt Jensen (different person from the one on Facebook, so also a red flag). The email also appears to be an official email address from a Danish hospital (custom domain). After digging a little, I found out that this person actually exists, and that he works at said hospital. However, I also found his official email address, and it’s a different one, with a different domain (clearly a red flag).
In any case, I hope this post also helps to raise awareness of this type of scams.
by jphzazueta
3 comments
!housing
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read the wiki, it is the most common scam and also covered in the wiki.
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so no need to help raise awareness.
> I still cannot figure out the scheme to scam someone this way, if after all I will be meeting with someone.
They send you a link to a fake site that looks like TripAdvisor with a listing of this property along with banking information, saying you need to send the deposit in order to set up the handover appointment. This relies on the idea that you can trust TripAdvisor, and the fake site is of reasonable quality.
Then, once they’ve received your deposit, they tell you that you need to send an additional deposit since they conducted a “background check” and something came up that is a red flag.
Obviously it’s all fake, there is no representative person.
Source: A coworker was scammed this way, but with a different fake site instead of TripAdvisor. The IBAN he sent the money to belonged to an Italian “casino bank” that was almost surely connected with organized crime. His German bank was unable to reverse the transfer.
The scam is simple. They will talk nicely and professionally. At some point they want money. They will send you to a fake Trip Advisor website with payment data. You’ll recieve a fake email confirming payment.
You pay. The money is gone. You’ll hear from them again asking for more money (banking trouble, repairs, electricity contract up front payment, they’ll keep making up stuff as long as you’ll keep paying)
You’ll never meet anyone though. Just more emails asking for more money.