Renters Get Swindled and Scammed NYTimes.com

IN New York City, the rental market can seem a lot like the black market. Renters are accustomed to feeling hustled, fleeced, and generally at the mercy of predatory forces beyond their control — and that’s when everything goes O.K.

Skip to next paragraph Related Rent in Haste, Repent at Leisure (June 28, 2009) Enlarge This Image Librado Romero/The New York Times

TARGETED Someone advertised for a renter for an apartment actually owned by Sabrina Seidner.

In this forest of stunted expectations, it can be tough to distinguish the sharp-elbowed fauna from the truly corrupt, a circumstance that has long enabled scam artists to thrive here. This year, moreover, the busy spring-summer rental season is unfolding in a time of falling rental prices, which means too-good-to-be-true deals — the con artist’s calling card — seem more credible than they have in recent years.

“We deal with customers all day long who think the market is 60 percent off when it’s really 15 to 20 percent, depending on the location,” said Gary Malin, the president of Citi Habitats. “Those are the types of people who are susceptible to scams. Whereas when you’re in a very strong market and hearing that prices are escalating and vacancies are hard to find, people are more leery.”

One of the most pervasive scams is a keys-for-cash gambit. Carried out online where almost all rental transactions begin these days, this ploy separates would-be renters from their money before they so much as set foot inside a dwelling. In this scheme, information and pictures from legitimate rental or sales listings are lifted from other sites and reposted under another name at an eye-poppingly low rent.

“It’s bad enough when another real estate agent takes one of my exclusives and uses the pictures to suck in clients,” said Sabrina Seidner, a vice president at Nest Seekers International whose listing of her own co-op apartment in Inwood was purloined last month. “But when they use it to hurt people and prey on their need for a hot deal, it gives you a bad feeling.”

In her case, someone claiming to have relocated to London advertised Ms. Seidner’s one-bedroom apartment on Craigslist. At least one prospective renter was induced to fill out an application and send personal information before becoming suspicious of a request for a 0 deposit to borrow the keys.

“Two people who contacted me about it had Googled the address of my apartment and found it listed for sale,” Ms. Seidner said.

Web sites like Craigslist warn of fraud in very large letters, but in the desperate search for an apartment, many otherwise reasonable people overlook the caveats.

Students and out-of-towners are more apt to fall for plots like the keys-for-money scheme, said Leonard Gordon, the director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Northeast office. “A lot of times they’re in one location renting in another location, and they’re more comfortable dealing on the Internet — they do everything there,” he said.

But even locals get sucked in.

Last month, a woman in her 20s who works in finance at a major investment bank responded to a Craigslist ad for a prewar one-bedroom at 470 Park Avenue. The pictures were “beyond amazing” for the monthly rent, ,300, she said.

Through e-mail messages written in awkwardly formal English, she was informed that the owner of the apartment lived in Alaska. Dissatisfied with his broker’s efforts to sell the place, he wanted to rent it out instead. But, he said, the dwelling couldn’t be shown until the superintendent came back from vacation.

Searching for the photographs one day, the renter Googled a phrase she remembered from the ad — “Park Avenue Jewel” — and discovered that the apartment was listed for sale with Wendy Sarasohn, a senior vice president at the Corcoran Group.

That jibed with the man’s story, said the would-be renter, who asked not to be identified in order to avoid embarrassment at work.

She walked by the building and spoke to the doorman, who didn’t recognize the name of her contact yet confirmed that the super was indeed on vacation.

“That was probably a coincidence,” she acknowledged in retrospect. In any event, that small detail kept her on the hook — until she was asked to prove that she could afford the ,600 security deposit and the first month’s rent.

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