Nigerian gold!

[ert]

Looking at sublets, I am now corresponding with someone from Craigslist who says she is unexpectedly out of the country with an "important job", but can rent me her (surprisingly cheap) apartment short-term with rent.com as a broker.  Her process is outlined below.  Does anyone see any way this *isn't* a scam?  There is additional weirdness not

Comments

[narbulwinj]

http://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx

[ert]

Awesome, thanks! I used this.

[kelkyag]

Certainly depositing money before you've even seen the apartment sounds like 100% scam to me. Showing apartments is what agents are for.

It seems worth reporting at least to Craigslist, possibly to the police. Why the FBI?

[iralith]

As well, it's worth noting that I set out to Google "rent.com scam" and found it suggesting "scam" as the second term before I was even done typing "rent.com."

[nathanw]

Yeah, it sounds pretty classically bad. I'd never heard of rent.com before; it seems not-terrible itself, but it's a problem if they're a tool of scammers like this. An article here claims that rent.com doesn't deal with your money, so that's a guarantee that something is wrong.

[starphire]

Ah, scams that also cut the signal-to-noise when you're looking for something you actually need. It is almost hilariously bad.

[bouncingleaf]

http://www.rent.com/company/security/