Ep. 25 - How to Protect Yourself as a Landlord or Tenant

In this episode of The Last Honest Realtor podcast, host David Fleming tackles the alarming rise of rental scams targeting landlords and tenants alike. With scams becoming more sophisticated, David shares practical tips, real-life examples, and a step-by-step guide to help you avoid falling victim to fraudulent rental applications, fake documents, and more.

From con artists posing as tenants to fake employers and doctored credit reports, this episode is packed with insights into the latest tactics used by scammers. Whether you’re a landlord, an agent, or a renter, David offers invaluable advice to protect your interests in an ever-riskier rental market.

In This Episode:

• How to identify red flags in rental applications
• The dangers of fake employment letters and credit checks
• Why scammers target tech companies and startups
• The importance of verifying ID and rental history
• Tools like FrontLobby, CanLII, and OpenRoom to uncover fraud

Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction
00:05 - Why rental scams are becoming more prevalent
02:15 - Spotting fraudulent credit checks and documents
10:25 - Investigating employment letters and companies
15:50 - Cross-referencing rental history and landlord references
20:30 - Using online tools to verify tenant claims
30:45 - Real-life case study: How I uncovered a con artist
34:00 - Conclusion: Protecting yourself as a landlord or renter

Don’t Miss:

• David’s personal story of catching a scammer in action
• A comprehensive checklist for vetting tenants
• Insights into how rental scams continue to evolve

Subscribe to The Last Honest Realtor on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform. Like, comment, and share your thoughts—have you ever encountered a rental scam? Let us know in the comments!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to The Last Honest Realtor. I'm your host, David Fleming. Thank you for joining me here today. And if you clicked on this because you saw the name of the post, rental scams. It's a pretty sexy topic. It's a pretty important topic. And if you clicked on it, maybe it's because you're a landlord or you're thinking about becoming one. Now, maybe you're a would-be tenant and you're wondering, does this cut both ways? Well, yes, it can. And I could tell lots of stories about potential fraudulent listings that I have seen, you know, such as this great$1,200 apartment that should be$3,000. And all I have to do is mail a check to this person in London and they'll send me the keys. I can move right in. No, today I want to talk about the other side of the coin. I want to talk about rental scams. I want to talk about con artists. I want to talk about people trying to fraudulently rent places or run some sort of scam. And I'll say this at the onset. We often don't know what the scam is. That's really important. Now, if you wondered, hey, is this a scam? If you knew exactly what the scam was, how they were scamming, what their goals were, it'd be a lot easier to deduce if it were. What I have found in recent years is that we have come across fraudulent lease applications and we don't understand what they're trying to do. Now, as with any scam, they get more and more sophisticated. And can you even imagine what's going to happen with AI when somebody calls your grandmother and it sounds like you? Yeah. Funny story, that actually happened. My wife's grandparents answered the phone one day and someone said, it's David and I'm in jail and you just send money and bail me out. Jenna's grandma said, you have your own money, bail yourself out. Then grandpa got on the phone and And he said, if you're Dave, what are your children's names? And the person hung up. That was pretty scary. Now, they're in their 90s, and that was just someone on the phone. But imagine what else is happening out there. We all get the scam phone calls. We all get the text messages. I mean, listen, I got that email. You know that email, the one that says they've been watching you and they know what websites you're on and they put some spyware on your computer and they know what you're doing and all they want was 50,000 million bazillion Bitcoin. When it comes to the rental market, there are a lot of scams. And Tara has a listing right now. She received an offer yesterday and Tara and Lindsay spent, oh gosh, I don't know, Jonathan, how long? three, four hours looking at this, and we're still not sure. Sometimes that's how much we have to dig into things to determine whether or not it's a scam. Today, I'm going to walk you through what you can do to protect yourself if you're a landlord or, hey, if you're a listing agent. Now, typically what we do on the listing is we say the tenants should submit, and I always make sure it's one for each, I say for every applicant, a credit check, an employment letter, the Aurea application, and a photo ID. Now, certain things you are allowed to ask for or you aren't allowed to ask for, if you wanted something on the phone, would you say it? Would you tell the listing agent as though you were being recorded and it was gonna be on the front cover of the Toronto Star? Hey, I require four pieces of ID and I want bank statements. Or would you say something to the effect of, listen, anything that you can provide would be helpful. Now, it's up to you. And ultimately, what I put on our MLS listing is must have Equifax or TransUnion credit score. I am not interested in Credit Karma. I will not accept it. And to each their own. That's just what I do. I will only accept the entire report. I don't want one page. It's not a scan. It's a true copy. And you can't black out any addresses or anything like that. It's very simple. Now, depending on the rental market, you might say, well, hey, what if you push the tenant away? Don't care. What's worse, pushing away a really good, really nice tenant or not doing your homework? So some of these credit checks don't have a score. You need that score. And while it could be silly, it could be a measure of your worth. I've got an 800 FICO score or Beacon score. I would say that we should assume that Equifax and TransUnion know what they're doing. And if they're going to put a person into a certain category, it's based on some metrics. Now, here's the thing. I mentioned that I will not accept credit a scanned document, because to me, that's where pages get fuzzy and it's easier to fake. I would also ask, why did this person print it and then scan it? When you download it online, it comes in a PDF. I will not accept a scanned document. It has to be an original PDF. Now, if you have the first six pages and the rest is missing, no, no good. If you have, here's the first page, this has their score, that's all you need, unacceptable. Now, most importantly, run your own Think about it. You say, I need an Equifax or TransUnion credit report. They go, no problem. They send it to you. It's full. It's not scanned. It's in a PDF. It looks good. Nothing's blacked out. Wonderful. Now run your own. And if it's exactly the same, great. But what if it's not? It's the first way you catch a rental scam. Now, the second thing that we ask for on the MLS listing is an employment letter. Now, the employment letter should have your name, your current address. It should have your salary, your bonus, any form of compensation. It should have your job name and what was the other thing? Your tenure. Did I say that? Now, of course, you can go to LinkedIn immediately and you can compare. You're looking for inconsistencies because scammers are making all kinds of offers on all kinds of properties with all kinds of different jobs and they're going to slip up. So if you get an employment letter that says that Bob Smith works for TD Bank. He makes$105,000 a year. He's been there for six months and this is his title. And then you go and look at his LinkedIn profile and guess what? Says he's been there for 14 months and it's a different job occupation, different job title, different occupation. Okay. Might not be a scam, but you're going to want to dig further. Now on that employment letter, And I've seen Photoshopped ones before. Anyone can go and download the TD logo, paste it into Microsoft Word, write a bunch of stuff, get a fake signature, and then save it as a PDF. Absolutely. What you're looking for is a name. I will not accept a letter if it does not have the name of the person who signed it and their contact information. So at a big company, yes, this will happen. But a lot of the times, the scammers are part of tech companies. And this is the most common scam. I'm sorry to anyone that's working at a startup. Most of the scammers submit fake applications and fake employment letters from a tech company because it's so hard to trace. Hey, we're brand new. Yeah, we don't have a big footprint just yet. You need the name of somebody on that employment letter and you need their contact information. Now, if such and such startup gives you the name Bob Smith and his phone number, great, you can call it. Maybe it's the scammer's friend sitting on the couch. You go in, you look them up on LinkedIn. So I did one recently where, yes, the person said they worked at TD Bank. I got an employment letter. That was her manager's name. I looked the manager up. She's been with TD Bank for 20 years. She's on the corporate website. You can search that person. You can see that they've been to charitable events. That person is real. Still called the person. Spoke to her because we're checking references, of course. I emailed her and said, could you just fire back an email? She did. Okay. You're verifying the tenant, but you're verifying their employer because with all of these scams, they have set up a fake employer, sometimes a fake website, a fake LinkedIn, and you have to do your diligence on that employment letter. So Google the company and find them independently. Don't rely on what the tenant has given you. As I said, you could be calling their friend who's posing as a manager. You could have something in the Aurea rental application or the employment letter that offers a job title. a name, a company, Google it and see. Because you might Google it, and hey, here's a link to a fake lawsuit, or sorry, a real lawsuit about a fake employment letter. Here's a link to a Facebook group where somebody had mentioned this individual. Google it and verify it on your own. So the third thing is the ARIA rental application. And the ARIA rental application is a document that we use. It's essentially a summary of everything. What's the date? What's the property? How much are you offering? What's your name? Who else is going to be living there? What are the last two places of residence? And here's where people slip up. The last two places of residence, where are you currently living? Where did you live before that? And here's where you can really do some digging. So again, you're looking for inconsistencies. You're looking on that application. Again, what's their job title? I saw one once where they sent an employment letter. They worked for, guess what, a tech company. Then their rental application said that they worked for a mining company. I asked the agent. The agent said, I'm not sure I'll look into it. Never heard back. Oh yeah, by the way, people aren't going to want to hear this. A lot of times the agents are complicit. More on that later. So in the application, we're looking for inconsistencies. Look up these people's friends. Their references, maybe they are real people. But who are they? Now start doing a deep dive on them. The references. So here's where you get into the nitty gritty. And here's where you're really... I want to say earning your keep as an agent or as a landlord. Here's the scenario or scenario if you are a blank, as Dane Cook said once in a comedy routine. You look at the area rental application. The last property that they lived at was 123 Fake Street, Unit 2010. Look up 123 Fake Street, Unit 10 on MLS. There it is. You can see that at least. Okay, wonderful. It seems to correspond with this person and how long they've lived there. Call the listing agent. Hey, how are you? Talk some shop. I need a favor. I just received an application from somebody that says they live there. Would you be able to look up or do you remember the name of the person that rented it? Now, do they have to do that? No. Is it legal? I don't know. Driving 110 in 100 is not legal, but we do it. So if that person says, yep, absolutely, that's them. Wonderful. You can also look up the buyer agent. On the co-op side, the leasing agent. Hey, guess what? It's the same agent. That could be really good, or they could be complicit in this. Now, here's another thing. And this is, I would say, somewhere between sneaky and brilliant. The name of the landlord at 123 Fake Street 2010. It's George Smith. No problem. You call George. George gives him a great reference. You look up on Geo Warehouse, the owner of the property. It's not George Smith. It's Dan Collins. Is it possible George Smith was just their friend pretending to be the landlord? The more digging you do on this, the more you're going to uncover. And it's funny because, and apologies if this comes off as untoward, but I'll often have somebody say, I can't believe I have to pay you to lease my property and find a tenant. This is beyond a loss leader. You have absolutely no idea how much time, effort, and energy goes into digging. And this is for every applicant. I mean, maybe you kick something to the curb, But anybody that you're interested in, you're doing hours and hours of work. So as I said, look up the address. See if the name corresponds with the reference on your re-rental application and the name of the person that owns that property. Make sure the landlord isn't their friend pretending. Look up the addresses. Look up the past addresses. And hey, you know what? A lot of these people, they are right at a university. So they give you an address in Waterloo. Look it up. Do some digging. Half the time, these people just Googled something random. They put it down. And it's a house that was torn down two years ago. I've uncovered that one as well. You lived in a hole in the ground. Hmm, interesting. Now, what about their photo ID? Okay, did you know, most of you didn't, did you know that you can look up the authenticity of any Ontario driver's license? I bet a lot of scammers don't know that. You can do that. Google it right now. Go ahead, put me on pause. I'm not joking. You can go and look up anyone's driver's license to see if it's valid. I'm not gonna lie. I only learned this about three years ago. But seriously, you get a driver's license. Okay, that's the person. That's who they say they are. And it's fake. And I did this. I'm gonna tell you at the end about a fraud we uncovered. But I did this. And it said invalid. And I, you know, I use Microsoft Paint. It's like my favorite application. It's been around since we were kids. I will often... go into paint, right? Right click, open in paint, whatever JPEG they've sent. And if you really zoom in, you can see where the pixels are different because I've done this for years in my blog posts and my MLS musings and when I'm changing certain things and editing photos, you can go in and zoom in on the pixels and see on a driver's license where someone's changed something. Now again, you can do that with any document they send, a photo of a deposit check, for example. But when it comes to the driver's license, I feel like people aren't really aware that this exists. Go and look up their driver's license. Now, next on my list, CanLi. The lawyers are like, oh yeah. You can go and search the name of any of these tenants, and you know what you might find? The person that just applied is a real person. After doing all this digging, they're real. You check their photo ID, it's real. But under Canly, you see three different lawsuits from other landlords who have been involved in this person. It's public record, guys. Go to Canly, put that person's name in. Because once again, I didn't do this, but a colleague of mine did, and she told me the story. And she said this person presented very well, credit check, employment letter, rental application, Zoom interview. And then they searched on Canly. And this is a professional con artist. And my friend said, I was that close. I said, no, you weren't close. You have all these other checks and balances. She said, yeah, I know. But it almost makes you think, despite having done all of the things right, we were leaning towards, hey, this seems like a really good candidate. Now, I mentioned that a lot of these companies that are named as the employer are fake. Landscaping companies, seasonal companies, construction companies, independent tech companies, startups. Google them. What kind of a tech company isn't tech savvy enough to have a website? And I'll tell you my story at the end because it was amazing. Now, you can go to the Canadian Business Registry website. and look up the name of these companies. Now, a lot of the times when you're trying to uncover a rental scam, you're talking to the agent on the other side and you're getting more information. So it's very simple. If you're stumped, hey, listen, you said they work for XYZ Corp. Is it XYZ Corp Inc or XYZ Corp LTD? Uh-huh, okay. And what's the address of their home office? Now, sometimes if that agent is complicit or if they don't even know and they're representing a scammer, you just don't hear back from them. That's a sign. They walked away. They knew you were digging. But if they do give you the information, you can go and further look them up. XYZ Startup Corp, Inc. Maybe you don't find that on the business registry. XYZ Startup Corporation, LTD. Hey, I'm just riffing here. But it's very, very important to do that. So I'm throwing a lot at you right now. I feel like we need to digest before we move on. I feel like we need to refresh. First, guys, I need a sip of coffee. I'm going to take a quick break. Welcome back. And just to summarize, because I'm throwing a lot at you, we do credit checks. They have to be Equifax or TransUnion. We have to have a score. We have to have it in PDF, all of it, not scanned. And then we're going to run our own to compare it. We're going to look at their employment letter. We're going to Google the company. We're going to Google the person that's signing it. Make sure there's a name, a phone number, an email, and we can talk to that person and that their HR or their manager has a trail. Our ARIA application is We're looking for inconsistencies, and we're going to start to dig on their past properties. We're going to cross-reference the name of ownership on land registry with the name of the landlord they've provided. We're going to speak to past listing and leasing agents. We're going to look up their photo ID, Ontario driver's license, to see if it's real. We're going to go through Canley and search them to see if they're named in any lawsuits. That brings us up to speed where we just left off before the break, the Canadian Business Registry. Every corporation... It's a public record. They're named somewhere. If you are a scammer and you're creating some fake company, you're not registering it. Now, you've got to be careful because if you have XYZ Tech Corp and it's real, the scammer might say they work for XYZ Tech Corp. So again, you could look them up and you could see that they're real. What I'm saying here, guys, is that if you do all of these things, eventually something's going to check. So you look them up. They work for this startup. And David said in his podcast, fake tech startups, that's a big red flag. Okay, they're real. Fine, the scammer found one of those. But you're going to catch them somewhere else. What's the name of the person that signed their employment letter? If there's no signature, you say, I need a signature. If there's no manager's name, I need a manager's name. What are they going to say back? I don't have a manager. Who created the document? Just keep working backwards. Now, there is a service called Front Lobby. Many of you have heard of this. Front Lobby filled a need. Front Lobby, for a fee, drives me crazy when I think about, you know, I just spent$1,000 in plumbing repairs on my investment condo. Tenant's been there for a month. You know what? It's money well spent. It's better than the tenant not paying. It's better than the place flooding. People drive me nuts when they get cheap. You don't wanna pay Front Lobby. Okay, well, you better be doing your digging. Front Lobby will do an independent credit check and they will do a criminal background check. If you've got your Equifax from the tenant and you've got your Equifax that you pulled yourself, you really wanna make sure, go to Front Lobby, have them pull an independent credit check and a criminal background check. Now, have you heard of Open Room? It's pretty big. Open Room, it's a website for landlords where they can go After an LTB ruling, why after? Well, because then it's public record. And unless you want to slander somebody or unless you're really clueless and you want to start openly opining on the internet before you've even gone to the LTB, not a smart move. But after an LTB ruling, you can go on Open Room and you can say, hey, landlord community, here's what just happened to me. Then you can say, Bob Smith, aka Daniel Jones, He's a really crappy quarterback for the New York Giants. Anyways, Daniel Jones, who ironically, probably based on his play, will be having to rent a crummy downtown condo for$2,000 a month. He just took me to the LTV, or rather I took him. I don't remember. It's been 14 months. And during this process, he never paid rent. And in the end, and they'll tell the entire story, and there it is. It's public record. It's on Open Room. And if you're a landlord, you had better be a part of that website. The people that do this, they don't just do it once. A lot of them are fake names. A lot of them are real people. There's all kinds of different scams. And the minute you start to think about what the scam is, you've lost sight of it. We don't scam for a living. We're not caught up on what the scams are. And I've heard out there people saying, is this real? I don't understand. What's the scam? And again, I keep alluding to the story I'm going to tell you at the end. If someone's going to provide$10,000 a month in rent times two for a luxury property, they're What could the scam be? Guys, don't underestimate the scammer. Maybe they're gonna turn around and rent that to 40 different people and collect 40 times 10,000. You have absolutely no idea. So aside from open room, then I would say this. Go to Facebook. Facebook, Instagram, right? You're doing a deep dive. But on Facebook, there are sadly, I mean, God, there's a lot worse, right? But there are a lot of groups, right? for bad tenants. A friend of mine is in one of these groups, not because she's a bad tenant. A friend of mine joined through a not her own Facebook account and was able to gain access and has sent me screenshots. She has downloaded this and she has tried to talk to the police about it. She has tried to talk to Rico because sometimes agents are involved. There are Facebook groups that are very private And they know what they're doing and they moderate, right? This is like, I don't want to use a terrible example, but like, this is like the undercover FBI agent trying to infiltrate that gang. And I saw what's on there. People saying, Hey guys, I just got a$50,000 check from my landlord because they bought me out. It's people explaining how they scam. Now, a friend of mine is part of that group. I don't want anything to do with it, to be perfectly honest. So I usually just ask her, Hey, can you look this person up? She says, anytime she gets an application, She puts that person's name into two of the groups that she's in now. So what can you find on Google? If you just Google the person's name, who knows? You can Google their name in scam, Google their name in rental scam. Just keep on digging. Now, last but not least, meet the tenant in person. If someone's running a scam, they might just say it's not worth it. I'm not going to meet them in person. And years ago... One of the lawyers in my dad's circle, I rented her house. And when I said, would you like to meet the tenant in person for an interview? She said, well, that's opening me up to a discrimination lawsuit. It was like growing up with a dad as a lawyer, right? And I said, what do you mean? She said, well, if everything looks good and then I go and meet the tenant and then I say, hey, we're not gonna proceed. How would that play out in court? Everything was fine until you met them. Well, maybe it's because they're this color or this sexual orientation or this age, or they have this bull ring in their nose. And I thought, oh my God, you literally feel like you're a prof right now, just opining on all the different circumstances. And she said, hey, look, what do you want me to say? I'm a lawyer. I know how courtrooms work. That's a completely theoretical argument. And I reject it. Meet the tenant. It's funny because she actually did end up meeting the tenant, which is amazing because I can't believe she let me win that battle. But she makes an interesting argument. Yeah, sure, if you said, no, we're not going to go forward, that person could turn around and cry discrimination. But guess what? They can do that anyways. So meet the tenant. And if that agent says, unfortunately, they're not able to meet, can we do a phone call? You say, hey, listen, I'm super flexible. If they say, would we be able to do a Zoom? You know what? I'd really rather meet in person. If you get to a point where that person just drops off the face of the earth, good. Because I don't believe there's anyone out there that's really trying to get a rental. And when push comes to shove, they won't meet you for 10 minutes for the proverbial coffee. So guys, that is my list. And now I'm going to tell you a story. Not too long ago, I received a rental application for a luxury condo that I had downtown. It's in a building where there are only two penthouses in the top floor. This is one of them. And we figured, who could we end up with? We could get a celebrity, short-term rental, someone filming a movie. We could get a hockey player. They love those places. It had a 2,000 square foot rooftop terrace with a hot tub. What do we get? We get two tech kids, but guess what? They had a dog and a baby. So I looked at the application. I was like, oh man, they make incredible income. They're in tech, right? They got stock options. It's great. They're combined making 600,000 a year. They're both going to work from home. The agent says, is that okay? Because we want to know. We want to know if that's okay. Yeah, it's okay. They can work from home. Yeah. And they got a newborn, you know, and like, that's, that's cool, right? Like the place is baby friendly. Wow, this is the nicest guy in the world. Yeah, absolutely. He's baby friendly. And they have this little dog. Is that okay? It's totally trained. And you're starting to unravel this after the fact and thinking, I mean, he was giving me reasons to say no. Well, he was a good con artist. So I get the rental application. I get the driver's licenses. I start going through stuff. And they worked for a company called I'm just going to say it because I don't really care. It was called K925 or K9 to it or fix it or something. So this is apparently a tech company. And I went to the website. And guess what? Any link you click takes you back to the main page. It was a fake website. I went and I looked. I spoke to the employer, the owner of the company, the founder, right? And there's kind of a giveaway, right? Like you're a con artist, but you're just arrogant enough to put yourself on LinkedIn and call yourself the founder. The guy's photo was also him in front of a luxury car. I'm just like, okay, yeah. So he's kind of an arrogant con artist. And I called him and he said, yeah, they work here. It's great. Describe the work that you do. He's very personable. And I went to the website and the website didn't work. And it was so simple. So simple. It's funny. If you've ever watched one of these YouTube videos on how magic tricks are done, I'm really, guys, I'm going like seven layers deep in my brain, Leonardo DiCaprio and Inception here. There was an episode of Baywatch when I was a kid. Bear with me here. And there was a magician who covered himself in chains and locked him up and jumped off the pier into the ocean. And when Pamela Anderson asked him, what's the secret? He said, I have a key in my toes. That's it? Yeah. Yeah. It's always a really simple answer. You see where I was going with that tangent? So sometimes, guys, the scam is not that brilliant. And I got through their credit checks. They looked legit. I got through their employment letters, looked legit. Their rental applications looked legit. I spoke to their manager, looked legit. I Googled the company. All over the internet. Their manager's on LinkedIn. He's been there for eight years. Before that, it gives me his whole history. Then all I did was go to the website and every single link was broken. So then I started to dig into it a little bit more. And here's where you really start to see the issues. So as I said, I looked up the place that they're currently at. There's no record of this leasing on MLS. Okay, maybe they leased it off market. So I looked up the last buyer agent and it was someone I knew. And I called him and I said, this is gonna seem like a really random question, but you sold such and such unit. He goes, yeah, it's great. I said, are your clients still there? He said, yeah. I said, do you know if they ever rented it out? He said, no. I said, are you sure? He said, yes, I'm absolutely sure. They're on my mailing list. I've spoken to them. whatever reasons he gave. These con artists gave an actual address, 123 Fake Street, unit Penthouse 10. They gave it. I checked it out. They didn't live there, but it was on the rental application. Then I went back to the previous place that they said that they lived, and it was the exact same thing. Yes, this unit had been leased on MLS, but the timelines didn't match up. These guys said they leased it say, starting January of 2024, and they left, I don't know, sorry, 2024, say it was 2014, right? And they left there in January of 2016. But when you go to the listing, it was on MLS in May of 2014. And it leased in May and closed in June. How could someone have leased that and closed it when someone was already in a lease there? And again, maybe it was a long time ago. They don't remember the dates. But the more and more you start to look at this, if you really dig into it, you can see where they've gone wrong. The worst part about this, guys, I called the agent, the buyer agent, the leasing agent. And I said to him, I have a bad feeling about this. He was like, yeah, sure. What is it? What is it? And I said, have you gone to the website? the place they say they work, every link on there just redirects to the homepage. And he had this kind of funny, like a nervous laugh when someone talks and then laughs. He's like, yeah, I don't know about that sort of thing. And he kept doing that. And I said, but have you gone to it? He goes, I'm not really a tech guy. I said, no, no, but you know what a website is. He's like, I don't know. It's not really my thing. Any normal person who is not running a scam would say, really? That sounds odd. You looked up in the sky right now and it was green. Oh, that's different. Ask anybody. Hey guys, did you see that green sky? No one's gonna be like, what are you talking about? That's not weird at all. When you call an agent, you say, you know your clients, the ones that make 10, that are submitting an application for$10,000 a month, they each make$350,000 per year. You know those people? Do you know the company they say they work for doesn't really exist? And then I talked to my friend, my friend who shall remain nameless, and she had received an offer from a different agent also specifying the same company with the same guy with his LinkedIn photo sitting in front of his car, and I compared notes with her. And we uncovered this, and we realized this is happening constantly. And the crappy part is, guys, and you're gonna be like, well, David, why aren't you doing anything about it? I think this was pre-pandemic. And now maybe it was 2021. I'm trying to picture where I was. Yes, I was in my home office. Okay, so this was somewhere between, say, 2018 and 2021. And I went to my then in-house legal counsel at our company here. And he said, look, I get you. But what have they done? They haven't really committed a crime. That's the problem. That's the problem. So on the one hand, if you want to go to the police... Well, these people haven't committed a crime. You stopped them from doing it. Okay, what about the real estate agent who's complicit? Well, now it's a RICO issue. So the police can't do anything about the real estate agent. So you file a complaint with RICO. I don't know, maybe they don't have the resources. Maybe they don't have the time. Maybe they just don't get it. Maybe the person that they speak to runs the same web of lies that they did with us. The bottom line is, and I don't want to sound defeatist here, I don't know what we can actually do about this. either as agents through Ricoh or via the police. I mean, look, my car got stolen. I think I mentioned this before. And yeah, cars get stolen in Toronto and we just accept it. And that's a reality. It's an unfortunate reality. And the police were really nice on the phone. And the guy said, yeah, listen, we're not gonna find it. You're not gonna hear from us. I was like, okay, yeah, no, totally get it. And you could tell he was frustrated. He goes, you know what? Like, honestly, if we did find it, it doesn't matter. Whoever stole it, nothing's gonna happen to them. Okay, yeah, I appreciate your honesty. So it's not just me when it comes to talking about rental scams here in my industry, feeling defeated and just admitting it like the police officer who spoke to me. These things are real. There are so many people doing it, so many attempts, and the scam keeps changing, the names, the documents, and the methodology. And I know that agents are complicit. And my friend, every time she uncovers one of these, she sends it to me. And agents are doing this. And I don't know what the scam is. I don't know what they get paid. But it's sad. Maybe they got to make a living. People have done a lot worse. So I don't want to end on a negative note there, guys. I want to say this. If you are a landlord, you've got to protect yourself. And I just gave you a whole laundry list of things, albeit going through pretty quickly because I thought this might be dry. I've just given you a long laundry list of things that you can do to protect yourself. If you want to be a landlord, well, did I scare you? If I did, hey, maybe it's not for you. In fact, I have clients who have a property and I'd have a big boy moment. They're like, ah, maybe we'll keep it and we'll lease it. I said, guys, you're not landlord material. Love you. Everyone's got their strengths and weaknesses. So if you're wanting to be a landlord, did I scare you? If not, great. Go ahead and use this as a Bible. If you're an agent and you're new or you're experienced, hey, let's compare notes. A lot of this is stuff that other people have taught me over the years. I did not come up with all of this. I can admit some humility and say that I keep referring to my friend. She's a sleuth. She's in the wrong industry. She should be a detective. But there is so much nonsense happening out there. And you know as well as I do, once you get that con artist into your place, you're never gonna get them out. So as far as the scams go, we don't know what they are. But there was one once. Tenant never got in. But guess what? They paid$2,000 a month times two into the trust account. But then they took deposits from 20 different people for the same amount. So they were happy to give up the 4,000. You would say, why would a con artist ever give money? Well, because they're smarter than you when it comes to breaking the law. And so for the$4,000, right, 2,000 first and last months, they went and they leased this space to 20 other people. 20 times four. They got themselves 80 grand. That's pretty ridiculous. Am I right? So don't try and figure out the scams. Because in that case, everyone's saying, why would a Why would someone submit a deposit? I have seen it all. The scary part is there's a lot more that I haven't seen. So guys, that is it for us today looking at rental scams. Any questions, email me. Any comments, please feel free to drop one in the YouTube comment section below. Please remember to like, comment, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And thank you, as always, for joining me here on The Last Honest Realtor.