These email s cams are very common - I get about a dozen a week. They are easy to spot once you get the idea of them. A lot originate from Nigeria, come from a Yahoo account, tend to ramble on with some kind of story which at times doesn't make sense, and often have bad English and punctuation.

The s cam comes when they send you more money than is needed, and ask you to refund the difference. The original payment is then cancelled. There are other variations of this.

I've also won the lottery about 50 times this year, and could have made myself about £1,000,000,000 in money transfer deals!

If you want to get an idea of what to look out for, or just fancy a good laugh, have a look here..........

http://www.laymyhat.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=31

Thanks for the link to lay my hat. If we had seen that site first we would have saved a lot of time emailing. Any one reletivley new to this rental malarky as we are would be well advised to have a look and get an idea of what to look out for. Thanks again

Yeah - i have had a few of these over the last year - Got that one from Piet yesterday - Hit the delete button right away

Cheers

LA

......and its not just the property rentals market that is targetted....we recently put our camper van up for sale, and had some eager buyers from far away countries anxious to send cheques.....
Just don't reply, your e-mail address could be used for spamming....

Hi
I think we may have the same man here.................

Greeting,
Am Mr Marcos Anthoney i have been trying to locate at least one owner of
a nice villa or Apartment thati can rent any way,
Dear Mr or Mrs, Am contacting you on behalf of the Villa or shuold i say
house for rents that was placed on the vacation home rental web site,I am Marcos
Anthoney from Brooklyn but we stays in here in the Great Britain for our
business to be in progress.
I am Interested in renting your villa /Apartment that you havefor rents
i will await your mail for further details ok. in which i will be checking in
and checking out in the dates below.
March 1st 2006 checking in
March 31st 2008 Chacking out:
Or Rather March 1st 2006 Checinking in:
April 31st 2006 Cheking out:
=========================================

I am really pleased I saw the first post, because when we received this mail it rang an alarm bell

Thank goodness for forums like this!!!!!

Geoff and Olya

I had someone on the phone yesterday asking if I would like an extra eight weeks rental for my property in Portugal, he had a foreign accent. I just said I wasnt interested as I generate my own rentals very well. It just made me very wary as I have heard lots of this scam stuff goin around. Regards Jayjan

Thanks for the feed back so far and glad to see that it may have helped others to spot the same s cam.
We were wondering what precautions can be taken when a booking enquiry is received. We would rather only let our accommodation to a certain type of clientele but how can you tell? What do you do to try and reduce the risk? Perhaps any one with suggestions would like to post them. We ask for ages of any one under the age of 21 on our booking form to try and spot a group of larger louts or similar but people probably would not feel to happy about answering all the questions we would like to ask. We once let our property to a woman who moved in her Turkish boyfriend (against our terms and conditions) unknown to us who was a very dubious character so much so that the agent that looks after our property felt quit intimidated by him and had problems getting him to leave before our next guest arrived. Looking forward to reading your comments. Michael & Jill.

Hi
We have the same probelm.
How do you know who wants to rent the villa?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Olya

Omg Gaser , hope he didnt cause any damage to your property. As regarding who do you know who you rent your villa to, well you dont really. We had a booking for 6 people (Only paid for 6) earlier this year from a guy who rents our property regularly twice yearly. This booking was for his daughter but un-beknown to us, until our rep informed us she had brought 13 people, (the house only sleeps 10.) We found out that she had brought blow up beds and all the things necessary for the 13 of them. They left the house in a dirty mess, but she didnt get her security deposit back which didnt even cover the cost of the 7 extra people. The cheeky person rang us 3 weeks after arriving home wanting to know why she hadnt received her security deposit back but my hubby was ready for her good style, she replied "Oh well cya duck", he also told her she would never be allowed back to book. We now have a booking form that has to be completed with all names , childrens ages etc with a few terms and conditions to try and alleviate the same problem We are lucky that we have a few guests who book regular , but others who book well you take the risk of not knowing who they are and trust they are honest. Regards Jayjan

we had same last weekend,wanted our apartment from Dec,told them it was not available until 2 Jan ,so they wanted them dates for three wks to do a experiment of some kind.my hubby has some thing on comp that can tell where the enquiery came from and it was Nigeria,one of our letting companys had already warned us of scams from this erea.

my hubby has some thing on comp that can tell where the enquiery came from

........this sounds like a very useful facility to have; is it possible to tell us all a bit more about it, so that we may have added warning with which to protect ourselves from dodgy dealings.....

this is the website traking tool that we use to monitor peoples ip no,s how many times been in site ,what country they are from, and their isp.it is free ,but you only get the last 100 log ins,unless you pay 7euros a mth for 1000, logins. http://www.statcounter.com/

.......thanks for that information; its now tucked away in our favourites folder, ready to pounce on an unsuspecting suspect......

it has worked for us ,hope you get satisfaction out of it.

These 419scams are just the norm!!

Take a long hard look at the following http://www.419eater.com and see how the masters deal with this scum! If you join in please ask for a mentor, or you may drop your self right in it!