Not so long ago my girlfriend and I were looking for a place together. One of the places we looked was Gumtree, the free ads site, having both had good experiences with flat shares off here before.

I’m not sure how popular Gumtree is worldwide. I get the impression that Craigslist is more popular stateside so if that is the case as you’re reading this you can pretty much just mentally replace one with the other as it applies to both.

Anyway, we straight away found a couple of places that looked good, were in decent areas and (most importantly) weren’t going to require selling spare kidneys to pay for. When we started contacting them we began noticing some similar stories. All the landlords we were getting replies from were ‘out of the country’, usually on business, though one did amusingly claim that her husband was ‘on a crusade in West Africa’ and that she was going to join him.

Most importantly of all, all of them asked for Western Union deposits to prove that we could pay the rent and weren’t messing them around. The way they explained this was:

- We would pay the cost of a deposit and a month’s rent to a friend (or each other) via Western Union

- We would then send a scanned copy of the Western Union receipt to the landlord

- The landlord would then meet us with the keys and we could pay them the money

Pretty suspicious, and luckily I was born paranoid! A quick google revealed that this was indeed a scam. What really happens is that the recipient of your scanned Western Union receipt just walks into the nearest Western Union shop (usually a long, long way away from wherever you are), hands over the scanned receipt and makes off with your money with no chance of you ever getting it back.

While I didn’t fall for it, I think this is an easier scam to fall for than some others because, as suspicious as the whole setup is, you assume that Western Union would have better controls in place. I think it’s also an easy one to fall for if you’re renting for the first time.

It’s worth noting that this applies to any kind of forum/free ads site (I’ve already mentioned Craigslist. A landlord using Moneygram should be just as much of a red flag as one using Western Union. A good way to save yourself some time is to include the words ‘no Western Union transfers’ in any email you send out as this should weed out the brighter scammers at least.

Lastly, don’t accept any excuses from anyone for not seeing a property in advance of you laying down the money to live there. Also make sure you see some proof of ownership before you hand over your money.