- April 26, 2024
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After 15 years of condo living in Siesta Key, Joel Fried was ready for the next step: buying a home on Siesta Key. What he wasn’t ready for, however, were strangers knocking on his door asking to see the rental property where they said they’d paid to stay.
After Fried bought his home in 2014, around April and May, his property has been a consistent target of a Craigslist vacation rental scam. It began happening while his contractor was renovating the property. People would come up to the house and ask to rent, Fried said. His neighbor told him that people were knocking on their door asking about Fried’s home.
Fried found an ad listing his property for rent on Craigslist. He flagged the ad, but it appeared again a few weeks later.
Interested visitors had contacted the ad poster with the name “Johnson Woodford.” One potential renter called the real estate agent for the home to confirm it was a rental – the scammer had used all the photos and information on Fried’s property from the listing agent’s website. The renter was getting ready to deposit $2,500 into the scammer’s Bank of America account; Judy Berger, the agent with Premier Sotheby’s International Realty, was able to inform the woman of the scam before she lost her money.
Some other people have done this kind of research to double-check the property, but Fried is worried for those who have trusted the Craigslist scammer.
“How many people have slipped through?” he said. “What if someone shows up with a suitcase?”
He’s continued to flag scam posts and notified the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, but in the meantime, he’s posted his own ad in the vacation rentals section of Craigslist Sarasota warning potential renters of the scam.
Wendy Rose, spokeswoman for the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office, said the local law enforcement can’t chase the scammer, because the victims of the crime are out of state. The victims of the scams need to contact their own local law enforcement and the Internet Crime Complaint Center.
