Techniques for Recognizing Fraud in Vacation Home Rental Ads

Summer is here and with it our well-deserved holidays, and although hotels are still one of the main options, it is clear that if you want to spend a long time away from home, enjoying the beach or the mountains, you prefer to rent an apartment and, along with it to go to certain vacation rental platforms that exist online.

And this is known to cybercriminals who are starting to publish offers for renting apartments on websites with attractive prices and in very interesting areas so that as many people as possible can bite and end up on the scam.

However, the Civil Guard has reiterated a few of the Internet Safety Authority’s advice to ensure we don’t fall for vacation rental scams this summer.

They breed in the summer #fraud😈 in advertisements for renting country houses.#Don’t get annoyed by using @osiseguro know the methods used by scammers #SafeSummer2022🌅🔗https://t.co/dcVws7Y183 pic.twitter.com/uGI22W0KWm

– Civil Guard 🇪🇸 (@guardiacivil) July 8, 2022

OSI explains that scammers are using vacation home rental websites to post fraudulent job offers for apartments they obviously don’t have.

The scammer usually resides in foreign countries, although he usually uses an intermediary in our country to receive the payment and then send it to him later.

A very simple scam, a cybercriminal creates fake ads with photos stolen from other sites. and with a very attractive price for the consumer.

A user who can’t wait to find a good vacation apartment thinks he’s found a bargain for the summer and contacts the cybercriminal to try to quickly negotiate and send him a down payment.

In this case, if the victim finally stings and sends him an advance, then later, when trying to contact the owner of the apartment, he will notice that he has disappeared directly, saving his money.

OSI recommends that there are no transactions, and that if we see something too good to be true, it is definitely a scam.

However, more and more scammers are trying to balance value for money so as not to arouse suspicion, so you should look very carefully at the descriptions, because if they contain typos or are written in a strange way, it is definitely a scam.

There may also be some unwanted issues, such as the contact phone number never working, or that emails are even answered from an address other than the one registered on the vacation website.

The user is also encouraged to verify the authenticity of the advertiser and the property, and even use online tools such as Google Street View to verify that the apartment actually exists.

User you should never accept unreliable payment methods or payment methods outside of the platform in which they want to rent a vacation apartment.

If, unfortunately, you have fallen for the scammers, you have no other choice but to report the false offer to those responsible for the platform and collect all possible evidence in order to then file a complaint with the national police.