I remember that four years ago we received an email from someone who had her property listed for sale here on Eye on Spain. She had just been conned out of €6,000.
She had received an enquiry from someone in Nigeria who was really keen to buy here property. He'd then given her some story about laptops in Holland (alarm bells?) and to cut a long story short, she's "leant" him €6,000 on the promise that he would buy the property.
Obviously he had no intention of buying anything and as a result she lost her money and still had to sell her property.
To say I was rather distressed by this news is an understatement.
So, we implemented some measures to try to prevent this happening again.
We decided that we would review all enquiries before sending them to the owners. We would check them every day to ensure that they were as legit as possible. Generally these fraudsters are quite easy to spot by us and they tend to contact many owners at the same time.
Some still get through our system so we always advise owners to be careful in how they handle their enquiries.
Today I nearly missed one. Take a look:
For a second I was about to hit the "Send to owner" button, especially as this person had only enquiried on one property.
Luckily I realised in time that this is one of those Nigerian fraudsters at work again. How do I know?
- They always use yahoo.com email addresses
- The phone number is either a Nigerian number or a fake (as above)
- The English is poor, it generally reads like it's from another era
- They use odd English names
- They tend to say they are respresenting someone else
So, if something does slip through our system and you're unsure about the trust factor of an enquiry, then please get in touch with us as we can quite quickly confirm if it is a fraudster or not.
The other thing to note, and this applies to rentals as well as properties for sale, is that YOU SHOULD NEVER PART WITH ANY MONEY. If you are selling your property or renting it out then they are supposed to give you money, not the other way around.
I really don't want to be receiving any more distressing emails! We do our best but we're not perfect so please just be careful.