An engineer in San Francisco said he lost more than $18,000 after someone pretended to be a listing agent and sent him to a real open house.
Alvin Tran found a two-bedroom listing in the city on both Zillow and Craigslist. He was interested, so he sent some messages.
He got a response from the post on Craigslist; turns out that Craigslist post was fake, copied from the real Zillow listing.
However, Tran didn’t know that yet, and started texting with the alleged scammer. Tran says he went to the open house and talked to someone with the same name as the person he’d been messaging.
After that, Tran submitted an application, which was accepted. He then wired more than $18,000 and after that, things started to unravel.
Erin West, a former Santa Clara County deputy DA and the head of a nonprofit called Operation Shamrock, working to disrupt scam networks joined NBC Bay Area’s Raj Mathai to learn more about these new scams and what to do when encountering one.
Watch the full interview in the video above.