apt./room searching

new to board, so please be patient. I am trying to rent out a room. I was directed to this board by my daughter who was alerted to one of your investigations. We thank you. I just received the following:

[color=#0000FF]

Hello,


how are you today? hope fine....My Name Is Suzan Scott, am 27 years old and a model....i saw your advert on craigslist.com that you have a room to rent...please i want to know if the room is available, the total move in price and when the room will be available to move in...

Am a single lady not married and have no kid....am easy going and dont interfere in peoples affairs,clean, respectful, and chill as well. I promise to abide by all your rules and regulations concerning the rent.

Hope to read back from you pretty soon regarding the rent.

Regards
Zuzan

it looks suspicious. Thanks in advance



Mod note: Moved to Help forum from Welcome forum -Jillian

Welcome to scamwarners.com tmp

It will help us to help you if you could post the e-mail address and the full/expanded headers that this mail came from.

Although there are none of the classic signs of a scam in this e-mail, they contain words I have sign a hundred times before.

If you have replied, please post any subsequent e-mails that you have received.

(please be reassured that if the enquiry proves to be a genuine enquiry, then the prospective tenant's details will be erased).

Welcome to Scamwarners.

it looks suspicious.

It does indeed. The English is strange and "she" has spelt "her first name" as both "Suzan" and "Zuzan". It is certainly a scam, and well done to your daughter for spotting it.

thanks guys. Both my daughter and I have rooms for rent and we certainly appreciate your help. Donations?
TMP

As Arnold already said, I have no doubt it is the beginning of a scam. If you could post any other correspondence, plus the email address and any phone numbers if you were given any, it will be very helpful for future victims.

BTW--I have actually known a few models over the years, and those that modeled internationally were not responsible for finding housing--their agencies always arranged housing as part of their assignments.

A few suggestions for anybody who is running a legitimate ad but wants to filter some of these responses.

-Open an email account that is not linked to your real name, address, or anything else. Use that email to respond to inquiries about the ad.
-Do not reveal any personal information in the initial responses, or any specific information as to the property location. Ask questions about who they are, what they do, where they are from, how long they want to stay, etc.
-Check headers. If the headers show Africa or Malaysia, the odds of a scammer are quite high, and you may want to stop right there.
-If you regularly do online business that puts you in potential contact with scammers, consider subscribing to a service like readnotify--you can get a free trial on their site. Readnotify will tell you when and where an email you send is opened, and can be very helpful for those scammers who use proxies or IP stripping emails.
-If in doubt, establish a firm policy up front that you will not accept checks or money orders by mail, and that you will not use Western Union or any other transfer service to forward or return any money. I wrote a standard "check acceptance policy" for a nonprofit I work for, and started replying with it whenever a questionable donation offer came in--at times we get on scammer mailing lists and start receiving large numbers of fake check donation scams (there really is no limit as to how low they will go). About 80% of the scammers disappeared as soon as they read that one email.

TMP enquired

Donations?

While that is a very nice gesture, at Scamwarners we do not accept donations, our reward is that you have been helped and that you may tell your family and friends to spread the word about scams.

Even by posting here you may well prevent somebody else from losing money to the same scammer which is ample reward for us

Please ask if you have any questions