Scamming in Frisco Town
Emma and I are moving to San Francisco this coming November. I heard the housing market is a bit crazy over there, but that didn’t prepare me for how insane it actually is. On Craigslist, we find apartments in a decrepit state with no facilities renting at 1500 USD per month. If you want something reasonable in terms of location and amenities, you need to pay over 2000 USD per month. This quickly gets into uncomfortable territory for my postdoc salary. I get a cost-of-living adjustment for living in France. I don’t really need it here, honestly. It’s more expensive to live next to my lab than here in France.
Frisco’s in an out-of-control tech boom. The tech giants and their younger siblings are expanding and hiring at such an alarming rate that many think there’s a bubble, meaning an unsustainable flow of investments not balanced by sufficient profits. Irrespective of the nature of the boom, the enthusiasm for Silicon Valley and its Unicorns is driving an already saturated housing market to look worryingly like the rentier societies of the 1800s. Office space is being built faster than new housing, leading to exploding rents and real estate prices.
We know where all these new tech employees are going to work, but where are they going to live? Don’t worry too much about that. The tech firms pay their employees generously. For them, the raising rents aren’t that much of an issue. In addition, people who can’t afford the rent anymore are forced to move out of the region, creating places for these new employees to take. It should go without saying that this situation makes a lot of people living there (or trying to move there) quite mad. Some other people may say that in madness… there’s opportunity?
Enter the scammers. We stumbled upon this great looking apartment on Craigslist. It was 2000 USD per month. From the pictures it looked clean, it was close to the BART, it allowed for pets, it was short-term, it was larger than the one we currently have in France… It looked perfect. We send an email to express our interest. A person named Kimberly Cox tells us to write her to her personal email to continue the conversation. She says she is a “travel nurse” looking to sublet a apartment while she is away. We do not find her on Facebook or LinkedIn, but I guess people with more generic names can be hard to uniquely identify on social networks. We oblige, and she sends us a link to a website called yourveteranhomes.com. The website features pictures of the building in which the apartment is located, and we confirm on google street view that the pictures match the address. There’s even a fully equipped gym and an awesome violin-shaped pool somewhere on the premises!
Kim Cox tells us to call the property manager. He tells us to file an application on the website. There are 11 other applicants so far, but they seem particularly interested in us since our situation seems “legit”. We ask to get in touch with the current tenant to ask questions. He also tells us that he can’t give us the contact for the current tenant for privacy reasons. Kim Cox tells the manager to work with us, and we file the application.
There’s a live chat on the yourveteranshome.com website, so we take advantage of it and start asking questions. Do you own all the units in the building? Where’s the awesome violin-shaped pool? The associate in charge of the live-chat tells us they do own all the units, and that the pool is somewhere behind the building. However, we quickly find that another company owns units in the same building. We also find that the violin-shaped pool featured on the website actually belongs to a former Goldman Sachs banker named Jay Dweck, who built the pool in the courtyard of his mansion in Bedford, New York. No wonder we couldn’t see it on satellite view in Google Maps. We spent the rest of the evening with a lot of contempt for the human species.
Thinking about it, the manager, Kim Cox and the live-chat person were probably all just one guy. He was after our deposit + first month of rent, a nice sum of 4000 USD. We started trolling him a little bit, kind of out of spite, asking why the pool is identical to Jay Dweck’s. The live-chat shuts down, and the Craigslist ad disappears the next day. We issue a scam report to Craigslist. Still, the same ad reappears a day later. We looked into Craigslist’s instructions on what to do about scams. We can file a complaint with the FBI if we actually got scammed, and but what I really want to do is put yourveteranhomes.com on a malicious website checklist, or have it investigated and taken down.
This is a cautionary tale to anyone apartment-hunting in the Bay Area. Do your research. Googling every piece of information provided in the ad has proved effective in our case debunking this one scam. I imagine scammers will either try to fake legitimacy by providing a lot of information, or try to reduce their exposure by providing very little. People tend to mistrust the latter more easily, so the former is probably a more viable strategy. The nice thing is that it gives apartment hunters more things to check. You can count on scammers to make mistakes. A lie is by definition inconsistent with reality.
We’re now completely turned off to the idea of looking for an apartment in the Bay Area remotely. We will probably just rent a hotel for a week, and hope for the best. The cheaper hotels that accept pets are still around 550 USD per week, amounting to 2200 USD per month, which is comparable to rent anyway. Maybe we should just live in a hotel over there. They are struggling because of the competition from Airbnb anyway…
I shot a few handheld time lapses in Edinburgh and turned them into a video. I have to remember to move even slower though next time!
