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A Jersey couple are warning property sellers to be on alert after someone turned up at their door to ask about renting their house – because a fraudster had advertised it for rent online.
Lawrence Slatter-Buesnel's wife had recently listed the pair's two-bedroom home in St. Helier for sale with local estate agents.
However, not long after putting it on the market, a neighbour knocked on his door and inquired about renting the property.
"I assured her it was for sale, not for rent," he told Express.
"We had five minutes of confusion with no idea what the other was talking about. But when she returned with her phone and showed me the post, I realised that someone had copied and pasted out sales advert, said it was for rent instead of sale, and said to message them for inquiries and details of where to pay a deposit."
Islanders who fell for the scam could have lost £1,400 – the value of the one-month deposit.
He continued: "What they're doing is getting the deposit and never actually renting the place. Hopefully most people realised it was too cheap."
"I don't know what rents are these days, but that low price obviously drew attention to it," Lawrence added.
Pictured: The original sales post on Facebook, which has since been deleted.
The sales post was shared on two Jersey Facebook pages, with comments marvelling about how the deal was "too good to be true".
After the neighbour had drawn his attention to the sales post, he reported it to Facebook and contacted the pages' admins, who swiftly took them down and blocked the user.
"I had a stressful time contacting admins, and there were two things that worried me the most: that someone would get scammed out of £1,400, and that someone would show up to my house on 1st September wanting to move in."
The profile – under the name 'Neil Strachan' – was "clearly fake", Lawrence felt, as there was no information or photos.
Express messaged the 'Neil Strachan' profile to ask if the property was still available, but received no response.
The profile had also advertised an "attractively priced" apartment described as "compact" and "smart" in Gibraltar – and had recently joined a Facebook group called 'Guernsey in the old days'.
He said: "I don't think the scammer is anyone local, but I want to warn others, and warn people not to use these Facebook pages for things like house sales."
"If my neighbour had never showed up on my doorstep asking to rent the house, I potentially would have never found out. I'm not a member of those pages, so unless a friend had seen it and told me, I wouldn't have known."
"And my neighbour believed it – she was curious about renting it and not checking whether it was a scam."
It's not the first property scam to impact islanders as a spate of scams at the beginning of the year led to thousands of pounds lost and one family without a home to live in.
Pictured: Express reporter, Charlie Flynn, investigated numerous online rental scams earlier this year.
Express spoke to local victims of these rental scams, and even interacted with scammers online, in order to gain an insight into how an estimated £22,000 was stolen from islanders through this method.
FOCUS: The rise of the rental scam
Jersey family left homeless after Facebook rental scam
LISTEN: How we're fighting against the fraudsters
Financial Investigator Faith Shalamon and Chief Inspector Chris Beechey, the Chair of the Jersey Fraud Prevention Forum, recently spoke to Express about the murky world of scammers, the impact they can have on everyday people, and just how challenging it can be to police this ever-evolving, truly global kind of crime... Listen to the interview below or via your favourite podcast provider...
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