Whether you or a loved one is looking to buy a house, build a house, or rent a home, scams are rampant as the housing crisis continues.
NBC CT Responds wants those of you in the market to move to watch out for even the smallest red flags because bad actors are just so believable.
Even a local realtor was almost tricked.
Susan Massey, a realtor out of Darien for Brown Harris Stevens, says someone reached out to her online saying they wanted her to help sell their land in Westport.
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Smartly, she did her due diligence and went to the town hall to look at the deed and other paperwork.
“When I was at town hall one of the people helping me said, ‘Wow you’re the, there have been several agents here who have come in to inquire about this property,’” she said.
That raised a red flag and then these online exchanges with the person confirmed her concern, “Please don’t put a sign up because I don’t want my friends and family to know I’m selling the home and then a little ‘tee hee’ in the text. Just in a lot of the back-and-forth when I was dealing with them and working with town hall. I started to realize that it wasn’t adding up. They didn’t want to come out to meet me on the property.”
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The person was pretending to be the owner of the land.
She says they even created an email account under the name of the real owners listed on the deed.
Massey says she’s hearing more and more outrageous stories like this, so, she urges people looking for a new place to live to be cautious because this can happen in home sales or rentals too, and in any neighborhood and price range.
Sadly, NBC CT Responds reported on many of these stories recently.
We spoke with another local realtor who says bogus online rental listings were being posted with pictures swiped from his real listing online.
Then, there was a guy who bought a property from someone who didn’t actually own the land.
The person he bought it from had a very similar name to the real owner.
“I mean these scammers are everywhere, in every industry and you just have to be on your toes. If you are deciding to do something on your own, make sure you do your own due diligence. If it’s a realtor, if it’s a real estate transaction, you have to pull the deed, you have to know who owns it,” she explains.
Massey suggests getting a reputable realtor to represent you to protect you from any problems.
