Breana Morgan is looking for a new place to rent in Campbell River and considering how tight the rental market is right now she thought she’d found the perfect listing on Craigslist.
“I came across this listing and it looked really good,” she said. “You know it’s in the right area, it’s in the right building, it’s the right size, it’s got everything close by that I needed.”
The listing is for a condo in a waterfront building on Adams Road in desirable Willow Point. The top floor unit has two bedrooms and two bathrooms in a spacious layout measuring almost 1400 square feet, all for $945 a month.
Morgan emailed the ad’s contact for more information.
“I wasn’t immediately suspicious because they did it really good. Supposedly it’s a guy who is from here, married with two kids, an engineer with a construction firm and the firm was moving him to a project overseas.”
She says she’s naturally skeptical so she sent an email to the engineering company in the UK only to hear back that they’d never heard of him.
She also knew that the price of $945 was about half of what it should be for the area and then found a real estate listing for the same condo.
“So everything, 2+2+2 was a scam,” she said.
Megan Centrone is the real estate agent selling the condo and says she’s aware of the scam and says the Craigslist ad has been taken down but put back up three times already.
“So basically the scammer has taken my complete listing, copied it word for word, along with the pictures,”
She says she is so frustrated she even contacted the scammer herself.
“Well I emailed him, I was very angry. I said take this down you scam artist, there’s no place for you here,” said Centrone.
Police say Morgan did the right thing by identifying the red flags.
“One of the biggest red flags that we always tell people is that if it seems too good to be true, it is,” said Campbell River RCMP Constable Maury Tyre.
Morgan did not lose any money and she just wants to make sure no one else does either.
Dean Stoltz
