I am a victim of rental scam, what can I do?

Hi, I just discovered that I have been a victim of a holiday rental scam. I lost some money which will most likely never be recovered. I live in a different country than the rental apartment was supposed to be.

What can I do about this? The local police in my country says that there is no point in pressing charges, nothing will come out of it.
Has anyone dealt with similar situation and had any results ?

Thanks,
Judy

Welcome to ScamWarners, judygarland - though I'm sorry that it is losing money to a scammer that has brought you here.

Unfortunately, the scammer will have been using a false name, and an email address set up with fake information, and probably an anonymous internet café as well - and is likely to be from another country, and probably one where his local police, even if they knew who he really was, would not bother to arrest him.

So your own police are correct - pressing charges is not likely to bring any results whatsoever.

The only thing you can positively do is to warn other people about this scam and this scammer, by publicising his email address and his emails. His emails will probably be a pre-written 'script' that he sends to everyone he targets.

If you are able to post the headers from his emails too, we might be able to tell his true country location from those. But please be careful to remove your own name and email address first, before posting.

And: if you have given the scammer your credit card details, please contact your credit card company immediately, in case he tries to use your card for his own purchases.

Hi Chris, thank you for your reply. I can not give up much information here yet since I am still holding a tiny hope that I will be able to recover my money. But as soon as I can I will post everything I know about this scammer who has almost ruined my vacation this summer.

Please be careful about that hope--scammers love to use it to extract even more money from you. Also be very wary of any paid service that claims they can recover your money. We have also seen many scammers promise to refund money to victims--but we have yet to see it ever actually happen--unless it involved a fake check overpayment that ultimately would land the victim in even deeper trouble.

If you paid by credit card or paypal, you might have a chance of recovering your money. If you paid by wire transfer, it's not going to happen.

Also, if the scammer has a website, by posting any emails from that site (with headers but your own info removed), you can help provide evidence our site killers can use to try to get the website shut down so they can't keep using it on others..

Thank you Dotti,

I am well aware that the scammers might try to scam more money out of me. I will not pay them anything again. The website has already been shut down.

Hi Judy, you have already been given good advice, I just wanted to express how sorry I am that these people have stolen from you.

As tough as it seems, you need to walk away from the idea of getting anything back, the only thing you can hope for is to lessen the scammers chances of stealling from others and to make others aware of the scam