Avoiding Vacation Scams From Renters

[admin]

Hey vacation home owners, do you worry about listing your vacation rentals and getting scammed by someone who is claiming to be a renter? There are actually some very easy signs that you can watch for to ensure that you aren't dealing with one of the thousands of vacation scams that are floating around out there so you don't lose money, lose your web site, or anything else. Think of renting kind of like posting something on a local site, like Craigslist. You want to protect yourself and your rental property, and there are some easy ways to do just that. Here are some of the most common red flags that you should watch for when you are renting out any vacation property:

1. Problems with grammar - this means major problems with spelling, grammar, punctuation and so on. It should be easy to tell that they are not who they say they are by simply looking at how they write their correspondence to you.
2. Email addresses - while millions of people out there use free email services, you want to watch to be sure that they aren't emailing from a different email each time or that they are using an email address that is obviously meant to be a scam by being way to close to a legitimate web site but is one letter off.
3. Their position - no, I'm not kidding here. The most common vacation scams are from people claiming to be the following: high ranking member of any country's armed forces, doctor, a high ranking religious figure, a secretary for a supposed millionaire or famous person, and - believe it or not - a sea captain. If you get requests from anyone fitting these positions, it doesn't always mean that they aren't who they say they are, but just be very leery. About 90% of the vacation scams out there right now deal with these particular positions trying to find vacation rentals for their family who is traveling to your country.
4. Money oddities - they want to pay more than what you are asking for the rental and have you refund some of the money back to them. This is normally with a story like they are renting for their son, daughter, nephew, or so on and would like you to cash and refund some of the money to that person for spending money. Normally, this is in the form of a check from their company, a money order, or cashier's check that is from a bank or company that you have never heard of and is hard to research. Ok, if this one isn't a red flag to you - come on. You should never have to refund any part of their money as spending money.
5. Overpayment - they want to pay you more than your normal rate for either refunding some money or something else that is odd. Normal vacation renters will pay the rate you ask for and be happy with that. Free money is never really free.
6. Obvious problems with their story - this can be in the form of problems remembering their own name, problems with what they have already told you, problems with their references to your property (such as saying they want to rent your cabin when it's an apartment), and so on. These should also be immediate red flags as they probably have several vacation scams going at once.

If you simply keep these things in mind, you will find that you can easily weed out those vacation scams that could have cost you money if you weren't paying attention. Of course, if you use a service like ReserveMy Home you won't have to worry about this as we help to screen applications for you and save you time and headache with dealing with scams.