How to protect yourself against rental scams

More than two dozen renters in a North Philadelphia apartment complex are reeling after they learned a couple of weeks ago that the property manager had moved them in without the permission of the apartment owner and didn’t pass along their rent payments. Now, the owner wants them out.

Rental-housing scams happen “a lot and to varying degrees,” said Phil Lord, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Tenant Union Representative Network. He has seen cases of absentee property owners whose agents have fraudulently collected rent from unauthorized tenants for a year or more without tenants knowing anything was wrong.

Rental scams in the city typically happen at single-family homes, not multifamily buildings, Lord and other tenant advocates said. Mike Carroll, a lawyer at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, said the typical perpetrator he sees usually “has no connection to [the home] whatsoever.”

“A creative crook sees a vacant place, puts locks on it that he has keys to, and rents it to a poor person who’s really desperate,” he said. The scammer collects a couple of months’ rent up-front and moves the renter in. Eventually, the property owner comes by and wants to know why strangers are living there. These scams disproportionately harm people of color, immigrants, people who don’t speak English fluently, and people with no money to spare.

“I look at those stories, and you just know they’re driven by desperation,” Carroll said.

Lord said the number of tenants reporting rental scams to the Tenant Union Representative Network has increased in the last four or five years, and the internet makes such scams easier to pull off, partly due to what he called “the Craigslist phenomenon” of people without real names or credentials posting dubious listings online.

“It is happening more often, and it is real serious when it does happen,” Lord said. “There really isn’t any reliable system to prevent it from happening, although there are steps you can take.”

An important step is to make sure a rental license exists for the property. Philadelphia tenants can search by address for licenses, which also list the property’s owner, at atlas.phila.gov and on the Department of Licenses and Inspections website, or they can call 311. But the existence of a rental license doesn’t mean tenants can’t get scammed. In the case of renters in the North Philadelphia apartment complex, the buildings have the required rental licenses, and the property manager was a valid employee of the owner.

» READ MORE: Scammed tenants at a North Philadelphia apartment complex can stay in their units — for now

But verifying the identity of the property manager is another important step for tenants. If a manager has no business address or post office box and wants payments in cash, “I tell people that’s a red flag,” Lord said. “Stay away from that.” Tenants should pay in a way that they can prove later if they need to.

Tenants should make sure the person they’re dealing with has written authority from the property’s owner to rent the property. Carroll has seen scammers print fake business cards and phony leases. Tenants also should search online to find what they can about the person.

“This assumes I have time, I’m a more middle-class person, I don’t have to move until the first of April, or the first of May,” Carroll said. People who need to move quickly are more susceptible to scams. And his advice also assumes that tenants have reliable internet access to run searches, which is not always the case, he said.

The Tenant Union Representative Network runs background checks for $10 and offers classes to teach tenants’ rights.

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Tenants should confirm all details of a rental agreement in writing and make sure their landlords give them the required certificate of rental suitability, which also lists who owns the property, said Alison deMedeiros, a staff lawyer at the Fair Housing Commission.

“That’s the best tenants can do in this situation is make sure they’re contacting the right party,” she said.

Lord also suggests that prospective tenants talk to neighbors, who often know about existing tenants, vacancies, or suspicious activity at a property.

After a scam occurs, tenants can call the police, sue in municipal court, and/or file a complaint with the state Attorney General’s Office.

» READ MORE: Your rights as a tenant: Check out our tenants' rights guide.