Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

From the screenshot, the scam is actually pretty easy to spot if you know what to look for. Here's some clues:

1. All accomodations are available (w/d in unit, pets ok, wheelchair accessible, furnished!) - eliminating listings with all of these checked will nearly eliminate the scam listings.

2. The description doesn't include any information about who's the renter. Usually the landlord or property manager will mention something about themselves.

3. Professional photos. This in itself is not a giveaway, but given the above two clues, almost always indicates the photos were taken from another listing. A reverse image search can confirm.

4. The deal is too good to be true. Know the market. $4.5k may not be enough to get you a furnished luxury 3BR single family home in the Bay Area.

I've had to browse through a lot of CL listings in the Bay Area and these are the nearly guaranteed ways I've found to eliminate the scam listings.

If that's not enough, I start my emails with requesting times of showings. If someone isn't willing to commit to meeting and showing me the place, I won't go any further.

Zillow also has lot of such scams, when I reported them unfortunately Zillow did nothing!

Anyhow, the single most significant indicator of all rental scam is that the perpetuator is not going to show you the apartment in person.

They have rental scams here where they will show you the house as well. One is where they pretend to be realtors and get the key from the listing agent.

I usually look up the tax records of the house. They are usually available on the county website and will show the owners name and when the house was last sold.

If you need to conduct a whitewater-level investigation of an airbnb spot it might be a sign the system needs to step up its game.

Not airbnb, long term rentals.

> Anyhow, the single most significant indicator of all rental scam is that the perpetuator is not going to show you the apartment in person.

Yup; never rent a house long-term without seeing it for yourself and meeting the landlord in person. Never sign anything sight unseen. And don't click on links in email.

Interesting that the scammer asked the author to search on airbnb themselves; that's what I'd do to avoid following a scam link. But if the house is not found, the victim will ASK for a link, increasing the chances they'll click on it by over 9000. And if the victim doesn't trust it, they'll just bail out - like with the poorly written emails, a good way to filter out victims.

So, we often hear that "it's so easy to detect these scam listings" in ebay, amazon, air bnb, here, etc. (same for false reviews, etc.) But if it were so easy, why do companies not work harder to block them out? (I know, Craig's List is a bit of an outlier as a hands-off marketplace, but let's assume that they come under fire for these issues and are forced to make a statement)

Is it the liability issues (blocking content implies taking responsibility for the content instead of just being a middleman)? Is it fear of driving the scammers to make ever better listings? Is it that the costs to do this outweigh gains? Is that the tech would have too may false positives?

All of these 4 steps are technically automatible; what's stopping these companies from implementing them?

The acceptable false positive rate for you as a consumer is a lot higher than for the platform.

> But if it were so easy, why do companies not work harder to block them out?

Heuristics that are easy for a human to apply aren't always so easy for a computer. How do you quickly judge in a programming language if a photo is of professional quality but nothing about the renting agent is mentioned? How do you judge if it's priced high enough to be vaguely plausible, but suspicious in context, by knowing intimate details of the local market in the way someone living there does?

I think detecting scams is much harder than most people really want to admit. Which is why stopping them is challenging.

> $4.5k will get you a 1 BR in the Bay Area

Average one-bedroom rent in San Francisco is $3,520, and two bedrooms is $4,550. It's much cheaper elsewhere in the Bay Area. In Oakland, average one-bedroom rent is $2,470, and two bedrooms is $3,050. $4,300 is very plausible in Oakland.

Source: https://www.zumper.com/blog/2020/02/zumper-national-rent-rep...

My numbers are a bit off since I last looked, and yes I was mostly looking in SF. Thanks for mentioning- I'll edit it. It definitely won't get you a furnished 3 BR with a decent interior like this place.

In this case the scam claims to be a house in North Berkeley (almost Albany), which I believe is more expensive than Oakland.

I saw a 1 bedroom for $4,700 in the Peninsula recently, which explains why that complex has so many 1BR available.

And somehow, that's still the profitable option and not actually filling the apartment.

Probably because waiting for the property value to increase over a year or two and then deducting paying the loan rate/interest over the time is more profitable.

Classic perverse incentive, the only way to fix this is a drastic vacancy tax.

> then deducting paying the loan rate/interest over the time is more profitable.

What does this have to do with not renting the apartment? Any business will deduct interest payments as a business expense.

And a vacancy tax isn't a good idea either. (Though it's better than the UK's tax rebate for vacancy.)

Just use a land value tax.

The problem is if they have some renters at the high price it is better to say they have tenants coming (even though they never arrive) than rent for cheaper and risk the old tenants find out the price is lower and they demand a reduced rate. Now add in a bank who is auditing your books: if you have some empty units "almost rented" that looks better than full units but you are not making enough on rent to pay the mortgage - even though either way you are not making enough in rent to pay the bills.

Banks don't conduct such audits.

If the loan requires that all units be rented for $x they will do something to check.

Bank loans to landlords do not contain convenants requiring that all units be rented for $x. You appear to be confusing policies that some lenders apply when originating loans with covenants that borrowers have to follow on an ongoing basis. Those are not the same.

That is really mind blowing to me. I just looked at the local rental website for my small town and the first 2 bedroom duplex I looked at had a nice yard and looked good on the inside and was only $900/month. That is in Canadian dollars too I may add. That $4550 would be about $6000 Canadian and you would have people begging you to move in if you agreed to pay them a portion of that.The highest rental I see on the site right now is about $1800Cad.

SF is just another world to me, whenever I read about salaries or rent, it might as well be on Mars. We just bought our first home(3 bed, double drive, large garden) in a large UK city and the mortgage is £580/month(~$750 for you Americans). And it's not like we're poorly paid either, we both drive brand new cars, go on holidays twice a year etc etc. And then you get SF residents being paid well into 6 figures and unable to have a decent standard of living. It's just crazy to me.

>And then you get SF residents being paid well into 6 figures and unable to have a decent standard of living. It's just crazy to me.

To be more accurate, it is only a subset of SF residents (in the IT space) that get that kind of pay, I often wonder how is the life of those that do not belong to that elite and that do not make that kind of 6 figures money.

They don't live in SF. It isn't unheard of to commute two hours for a retail job in SF just to get where you can afford the rent.

Well, there must be also a given number of "middle class" people, that are not top notch programmers, nor "entry level" or "retail".

If we take these as valid data:

https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/occupationalem...

And set an arbitrary threshold at 45 US$/hour, the amount of people exceeding that are 31.1%, if we set it at 50 US$/hour they are 19.4%.

If we draw another line, those that get less than 25 US$/hour are 42.1% and those that get more than 25 but less than 45 are 26.6%.

So, even if we assume that 40% of people commutes for long distances (and BTW technically are not SF residents), since only between 20% and 30% of San Francisco workers can actually afford it, it still leaves us with 30%-40% of people that must be in a really tight spot.

I'm not an expert in California, but if I understand prop 13 correctly it is possible some of those are people who have lived in SF for many years at the same address - their house is paid off and taxes are minimal so they can afford to live on much less. If your house only costs $400/month to live in ($100 insurance, $100 taxes, $200 other utilities) minimum wage still leaves plenty left over, and presumably if you bought a house 30 years ago you were worth more than minimum wage...

Maybe that would account for a part (I am also not at all an expert in California, so it is just speculation), but those cannot reasonably account for 40% of workers.

I mean, if you live in SF and have a yearly income of "only" 50-60,000 US$ working some 2000 hours at 25-30 $/hour, and you live in a house that you can rent for roughly the same amount or that you can sell for (say) a million, what actually keeps you there?

Maybe you can find somewhere else a similar job, paid in the 15-20 $/hour range, you lose 20,000 on the job but get an additional 40,000 from the rent or from interests on the capital.

What's the city and what website did you use? I didn't find many such options when was looking over (though not that thoroughly).

I am Canadian. I live on the West Coast. Vancouver has lots of high expense rentals but move out from there and any of the small communities there are plenty of low cost nice rentals.

It's all about the area. I have friends who moved to Chandler AZ and rented an entire single floor house with 2 car garage, 2br and in ground pool for $800 month. That was 5-6 years ago but way more affordable than the 1600+ in NYC for a 2br apartment.

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