For some time now, a scam has targeted owners who rent their accommodation in individuals to individuals.
In summer, the crooks never take a vacation. On the contrary, they take action. They target the honest people more, who suspect nothing. Their goal, very often, is to extract money from them without making too much effort. For this, the scammers have many pads, and one of them directly aims at the owners who rent their property to individuals in high season and low season. And it is formidably well put together. It was Hervé Paccard, director of the Mediavacances.com vacation rental platform, who launched the alert a few years ago. The scam is therefore far from new, but it continues to make victims from one year to the next, especially during the summer season.
Indeed, according to the specialist, no accommodation is spared as long as the property is available on “A long period in order to increase the diverted sums”. The scam is based on an apparently harmless detail: payment method. For owners, it may seem commonplace. However, in this type of scam, everything is played out on this. We are talking about reimbursement fraud here. Concretely, what’s going on? A false tenant identifies an advertisement on a vacation rental site and contacts the owner to reserve the accommodation over a long period, which may seem reassuring. He then sends a check (a payment method still accepted on certain announcements), but not the right amount: it is much higher than the amount appearing on the invoice.
Quickly, he pretends an error and asks the owner to donate the difference to him, by transfer, when he receives the check. The check arrives at your destination. The owner, thinking that it is a real one, immediately reimburses his client. But a few days later, the bank discovers that the check is stolen, falsified or without provision. She refuses it and debits the sum of the transfer made. But impossible to backtrack, the pseudo-local no longer responds. Result: for a rental at 3000 euros, if the crook sends a check for 5000 euros and the owner reimburses him 2000 euros of difference, the latter loses 2000 euros in a few minutes, without seeing anything coming, not to mention the fact that he was not settled, a loss of 7000 euros.
More recently, the scam took a form “More modern”according to mediavacances.com. Without using a check, the false tenant claims to have paid the rental via a money transfer company like Western Union, supporting documents. He also claims to have had to pay high “processing costs”, which he asks the owner to reimburse him by transfer. “Of course, the evidence is fake, the fraudster has paid nothing and any reimbursement is lost”, explains the platform.
To avoid such a mishap, it is essential that the owners protect themselves upstream. For example, it is always better to go through a platform with secure messaging, which limits fraudulent contacts more. In addition, one should never reimburse a tenant who paid by check without written confirmation of the bank that the funds are definitively credited. And above all, refuse any payment via a money transfer company like Western Union: this is another alert signal!
