Short: They are far too easy for scammers. Low effort, difficult to trace, and low prosecution interest. If you are looking for new apartments, you might want to have read this short article first.

This here is one of the less brainy, sociological blog posts. This is one, that I wish I didn’t need to put out there. I hate that stuff like scams work off of exactly the human instinct, that is needed for most pleasant societal interactions. Thankfully rent scams are easy to avoid, once you are aware of them, and you can go ahead and still think if (most of) your co-humans as trustworthy.

The start of my work life is currently pulling me to Germanys biggest city and capital: Berlin. Looking for apartments in Berlin leaves you keenly aware of how gentrification works, and has me realize, I am part of the problem. Rents in Berlin are HIGH for German standards. I have studied in two medium cities (Erlangen: 100k citizens / Bamberg: 80k citizens) and both pride themselves of being expensive, because they are beautiful, have high paying jobs, and loads of students leaving a permanent skew in supply and demand (in the advantage of the suppliers). However Berlin just about doubles the prices in Erlangen and Bamberg!

With rent being just about the single most costly thing humans spend money on, the Berlin housing market being highly volatile and fast paced, and the perception (at least of most rentees) being that (good) deals need to be closed fast, the scene is set perfectly for scamming.

When I almost fell for one of those scams I learned a lot. Here is basically how most rent scams work:

• step 1: hooking victims with “the perfect deal” (these tend to be too good to be true - which they are - if you know a little about the respective housing market)

• step 2: getting something from the victims without having to show themselves

For step 1, you will see apartments that have an insane value (price, size, location). They will sell these unbelieveable deals as due to the kindness of their hearts, and them not necessarily needing money.

The scammers will frequently link step 1 to step 2 as they claim to live abroad. They let you think, they might not care too much about the exact rent pricings, they are themselves settled and got to own the apartment due to some non-economical context (they bought it for their nieces studies, or they inherited it).

For step 2, the scammers will tell you, that they are currently not on-site and in another country (these tended to be “trustworthy” countries: I so far had: “Spain”, “Sweden”, and “Switzerland” - maybe the country HAS to start with S for some reason ^^). They argue that they will use a third party as intermediary. These will be some recognizable brands like airbnb. They argue, that these intermediaries need a deposit, that will later act as THE deposit (common when renting apartments in Germany), and every cost for the intermediary will be graceousely covered by the “landlords” themselves. These intermediaries will get the keys and will handle the on-site operations.

As a side note: The communication with the scammers will be nice, with a tendancy towards informal. They will talk about their personal life and about how they want to find the right rentee, but they also will nudge you to quick action, as they have to decide quickly (which is actually common for subletting apartments). This will keep you engaged, hopeful, and distracted.

You will get a link to “airbnb”’s website where you can book the deposit. But the worded link “airbnb.de” will have an embedded link to a scam clone website. Mine was creatively “alrbnb.[something]” (with the ‘i’ in the domain, replaced with an ‘l’). The scammers also wanted me to send fotos of my ID. This was where all my hope skipped town and I knew this was not right.

Now that you know how one of such scams might look like, the two quick infos that will help you avoid most of the scamming headaches.

• Don’t send someone you haven’t met the fotos to your ID

• Don’t ever give advanced payments on apartments you have not visited

After calling the police to report the scam, they asked me these two things. I was in the clear! But also the call showed me one more thing. The police seems to care little to persue these scams (at least the police in Passau). I realize that this is not too easy, but I could have provided them with the used phone number, the link to the clone-website, the specific apartment advertisement, and the email adresses used. The police did not care for any of that, even claiming, that there was no crime until I would have given them my money (which I am rather certain is not the way scam/fraud works legally).

After this experience I ran into some more of these advertisements that were very likely scams, and I did not persue them further. Knowing of them helped me to avoid them. I hope, now you can stay safe too. Good luck, finding your new (forever) home and stay safe!