Tips

We'll start with some tips since many folks only read the first few paragraphs of a web page :).

For Buyers

1. Don't send money before your sign a Purchase and Sale Agreement.

2. Always use a lawyer to close your real estate purchase.

3. Don't send money via Western Union.

Western Union does not verify recipients of money well. Plus, money sent to a Western Union office in Italy, for example, can be picked up ANYWHERE in Italy. So even if you sent your money to the seller at specific Western Union office in Italy and had the police stake it out, the scammer could easily go to ANY Western Union office in Italy and get the money. Amazing but true. EBay agrees with us on this: See eBay recommendations for payment here.

You can send money via a bank wire transfer. This will require the recipient to have a valid account at a specific bank. This is much easier to trace and stop.

4. Talk to the seller on the phone. If they want to sell the property, they can talk to you for 5 minutes. Get a phone number and call them back after they call you. Call them a few days later to make sure the number is still valid.

5. Have the seller send you information by mail.

For Sellers

1. Don't send information until you talk to the prospective buyer. If they buyer won't provide a phone number, forgetaboutit. Scammers use property information collected this way to create fake listings.

2. Watermark your photographs. This will make it more unlikely they'll be stolen off the web for use on other sites.

3. Put an unusual keyword or phrase somewhere in your listing. After a few weeks online, you'll be able to search Google or other search engines for this keyword. If someone has taken your listing information, you might find it this way.

4. It's ok to ask the buyer to put down some money when they make a written offer on the property.

Scams

Stolen Listings/Fake listings

This is how the scam works.

A fraudulent seller takes legitimate sales information from a property website. They post it on another site, using their own contact information. If necessary they use a stolen credit card number to do so. When a potential buyer contacts them, they encourage the buyer to send them some amount of money as down payment. Often the seller suggests an escrow site that is fake (but looks legitimate). They are then never heard from again.

LandAndFarm.com has identified nearly a dozen fake properties on our site in the last 4 years. 9 of these were all placed during a two week period in summer 2004 using a score of stolen credit cards, and fake contact information. The scammers also were posting from locations within the United States (we know this from their IP addresses); they were using wireless hookups on both the East and West Coast. Buyers were contacted from free Yahoo! email accounts.

Prospective buyers were directed to a fake escrow site (www.property-net.com) that looked completely legitimate to put a down payment. However, by doing a DNS lookup, we found that the site was hosted in Russia. In addition, the contact information for the site (an address in Pennsylvania) didn't exist. It took nearly 3 weeks to get Yahoo! to remove the scammers accounts and nearly a month for the site to get shut down. We'll never know how many folks were scammed. These scammers had placed listings on many other sites besides LandAndFarm.com and they are probably still operating.

We know this scam is currently being perpetrated in the summer rental market because renter due diligence is lower than in property purchases.

For Sellers

The big problem for sellers is that their listings may be hijacked and placed on other sites. There is no way to prevent this unless the real seller or a saavy customer sees the fake listing.

The fake listing can cause buyers to question the integrity of the seller, plus harm the website with the fake posting.

In addition, the listing itself and the photographs are the property of the seller and/or the website so there is an intellectual property theft issue on top of the other issues.