A bitcoin scam involving a bunch of house renters has taken place in the city of Vallejo, California. In what is certainly a unique spin on scam-based bitcoin behavior, it appears someone pretended to be a landlord of a vacant home and said that a $2,000 down payment in BTC was all that was needed to give a family a new place to live, but things weren’t as simple as they seemed…
How Bitcoin Scams Are Taking on New Form
In the crypto space, traders and buyers often go by a simple rule: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, and that’s the best way to describe the situation at hand. A suspect had found a specific property and spent time placing it on several rental sites. From there, a family reached out asking about the property and what it would take to serve as new renters.
From there, the suspect posing as the landlord said that he would not need to meet them face to face. He also would not need any background information, nor would he have to engage in a credit check of any kind. All he would need was a $2,000 bitcoin payment. This would be enough to get them into the house quickly.
Naturally, the family felt that they had hit the jackpot. The only problem was that the house was not up for rent, nor was the person posing as the landlord in any position to rent the home out, and it wasn’t until two days after they unpacked that the family had learned they were the victims of a scam.
Krystle Karimian – CEO of the property management company in charge of the home – described the suspect in a recent statement:
Scammers are getting smarter… We track renters and prospective renters and he acted like he was going in and viewing property. Instead of viewing it, he gave the ‘keys’ to a family and pretended he was the landlord.
Trying to Help the Family Out
Karimian believes that the man had gotten the keys to the home either through taking a tour of the home and stealing it from a tenant or by posing as a potential renter himself. Either way, the man has been traced to an address in Los Angeles and was revealed in a report to be 35 years of age. He is also believed to have shown the property at least four times to people.
The property company was then forced to tell the family what had happened. The situation is made even more devastating considering the family consists of children and a young man who’s bound to a wheelchair and cannot use stairs. The company has since started a GoFundMe page in the hopes that it can raise $5,000 for the group to help them relocate.
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