Real estate agents and landlords

Real listings, fake agents

Rental fraud rarely invents a property. It copies a genuine listing — photos, floor plan, address — and replaces the contact details, using a stolen agent headshot to make the new contact look legitimate. Victims frequently recognise the property, which strengthens rather than weakens their confidence.

Who gets hit

Students and people relocating internationally are the most exposed, because a remote arrangement is genuinely necessary for them and a request to wire a deposit before arrival does not feel unusual.

The agent's problem

Agents discover it when prospective tenants turn up at a property with a signed lease and a receipt. Agencies spend real money on warnings and verification processes because their staff photos are being used to steal from their own market.

If these photos are yours

You are the second victim of this scam. The money goes to strangers, but the face, the name and the reputation are yours — and the angry messages from defrauded people land in your inbox, not the scammer's.

• Save everything: profile URLs, screenshots with visible usernames, message threads, and the dates you found them.
• Report the fake profile on the platform itself under impersonation, not spam. Impersonation reports are actioned faster and you can usually attach a photo ID.
• File a report with your national fraud body (IC3 in the US, Action Fraud in the UK, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, or your local police cyber unit).
• Submit the scammer's contact details — the email, phone, wallet or profile handle, never your own — to our database so the next person who searches that identifier finds a warning instead of a fake romance.
• If someone contacts you believing they were talking to you, be kind and clear: send them to a search page so they can verify the details for themselves.

If you were talking to one of these profiles

Slow down before you send anything. Ask for a live video call on a platform the other person did not choose. Ask for a photo holding a handwritten note with today's date and an unusual word you pick. Run the phone number, email, username or wallet address through our database. A genuine person will pass all three in minutes; a stolen-photo persona will produce excuses — bad signal, hospital shift, offshore rig, army firewall, "you don't trust me".

Never send money, gift cards, crypto or copies of your own ID to someone you have not met in person, no matter how complete the story sounds.