Area Realtors Targeted by Scam

As the Biz Journal noted yesterday, area Realtors have been no exception to the litany of online scams so many of you out there have learned to be leery of... The article notes "Agents in St. Louis, Chicago and Minneapolis have received emails in the past two weeks directing them to negative consumer reviews on the site. Earlier this month, 44 St. Louis agents from Coldwell Banker Gundaker received email notices that they were the target of consumer complaints." The twist is that the complaints are fake and the site, www.realtor-complaints.com, offers realtors a chance to have the complaints removed, for a fee of course.

Moral of the story: sometimes in addition to "buyer beware", it should be said "salesperson beware".

Such scams are nothing new in the evermore online world of real estate dealings. A recent client told us about how they got a email notification that looked exactly like ones they regularly received from Zillow.com, which notified them that their house was in default and set for public auction. Of course, this was not the case as public records and calls to their lenders proved. However, the email had links to sites that mirrored public tax record sites indicating the default and a convenient link to get further information about the foreclosure actions that asked for personal, confidential information that would have allowed for their identities to have been compromised.

Fishing scams like these are common and are targeted both toward buyers, sellers, and agents. The best advice we give our clients is when you get an unsolicited email related to a real estate matter, confirm it's origin by googling it's subject, calling the publicly listed phone number of the source (not the one in the email), and/or verifying it with a third party before proceeding.

Like all matters, asking an expert is always your best option and most of the time, such advice is free. And, when you discover someone has made an attempt such as this, take a few minutes to email the details to your State's Attorney General.

http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/morning_call/2013/01/real-estate-agents-scammed-by-phony.html