I own an two established vacation rental services advertising rentals across Canada, the US, Costa Rica and worldwide.
I thought it might be valuable to understand the complexities of vacation rental scams from an agencies experience.
Scams aren't new, they have been around for ages. What is new are the ways scammers try to extract money from others wallets.
Many of the scams towards individual owners have already been addressed by members of this forum. Two new ones that you might want to be alert for:
Individual owners be cautious!
1. Overpayment by credit card. The scammer pays you for their rental by credit card (its stolen and you will receive a chargeback in two to three months) but wishes to overpay with a very intriguing excuse.. Asking you to send the excess payment back, usually by wire. Never wire money unless you know the person really well (brother, sister, son, daughter). Wiring money as part of a vacation rental transaction is always a scam.
2. Fishing: lately many attempts have been made to mass email our property owners with one sentence questions. I say attempted as all have been blocked. However be aware if you advertise on Craigslist and other free advertising organizations you may have already received this request.
The email arrives in your inbox asking questions like: Do you have vacancies at Thanksgiving? How much is the rate and deposit for a week? Is your home near a beach? etc. Thousands of these questions are sent out by someone at either a @emacmail.com or @yahoo.com email addresses.
Are they fishing for your email address for future spam or perhaps they have set up their own vacation rental website and have copied your vacation rental ad and photos, now just need your email? A year later you receive an invoice in the mail to renew. for a property you don't recall listing. You check and sure enough your listing is there... You complete the contact form and sure enough receive your own email. You have been duped into thinking you signed up for this agency.
From a Advertising agencies prospective
1. Most agencies monitor email and quickly block spam and scams. Many agencies, at least experienced ones are also aware of non existant property ads, submitted with payment, including photos and great write ups, but at the other end of the email is a scammer waiting for a trusting renter. These scammers copy legitmate ads, photos from other sites then submit them with payment to an agency. The credit card number is stolen and usually is acctepted until the real owner of the card number receives their bill. By then the damage may be done, renters taken to the cleaners, vacations spoiled and an endless line of correspondence between the victim and the police and of course vacation rental agency.
The really sad part is most established agencies can identify these scam attempts and refuse the listing or block them from using the site. The scammer goes on to other websites sites that offer free rentals and eager to build their data bases without checking for scams.. They display the fake ad, unknowst to them that it is a scam.
Scammers ads can slip through initial screening and they can appear on established sites, but 99% are screened out.
Over the years most scam attempts on individual vacation rental owners have come through by emails from yahoo, gmail, mac, live and other free web based email services.
2. Scams against agencies. Emails and even phone calls suggesting the management company has over 100 properties they wish to advertise and of course will pay by check...requesting the agency to send the overpayment back by wire.
3. The most disturbing scams are those by new agencies that copy ads from legitimate sites, place the ads, photos on their site and claim them as their own. This is an attempt to build up their own database and thus raise their rates for unsuspecting rental owners that are wishing to advertise their home. Sometimes these sites offer free listings and make their revenue by Google adsense being displayed on every page of their site. They aren't interested in promoting your rental, they are interested in lining their pockets with the Google ads.
Thank you for providing very useful information for all of us involved in vacation rentals. I think these scams will be very difficult to stop. However, if vacation rental owners become more aware of these tactics it will be a great step forward into reducing these types of scams.
Advertise on Six Vacation Rental Directories Get Your Trusted Seal!
Get Your Trusted Seal!
I am sad to say, that we at rentals365 have experienced all these scams. We are very selective on the properties that we list, so therefore have just a few hundred listings at the moment. We could have gone down the route of allowing thousands of non paying listings, but have decided not to, as these listings will only be duplicates of properties from other sites - and Google penalises duplicate content anyway.
We find it fairly easy to detect all scams, as we have a few years experience now, but you have to always be on your guard. The listings websites that do not seem to care, and are only interested in building large databases are ruining it for the serious operators.