READING, Pa. – Reading Police say rental scams are on the rise.<\/p>\n
“Often, when it seems too good to be true, it’s normally the case,” said Reading Police Sgt. Trevor Atkins, who says they’ve had numerous reports of people dealing with fraudulent rental ads.<\/p>\n
Kristi Byrne with the Berks Coalition to End Homelessness says rental scams are a problem the organization sees often.<\/p>\n
“There are people that come in all the time and it’s just sad story after sad story of people being preyed upon for their vulnerabilities,” Byrne said.<\/p>\n
She says most recently, a family came in that had put down a $750 deposit for a house they saw in an ad that ended up being fraudulent.<\/p>\n
“They already have like a heightened sense of urgency to find stability for themselves or their families [and] this really causes them to overlook a lot of red flags that either you or me might see,” explained Byrne.<\/p>\n
Reading Police recently posted a warning on social media about these rental scams. Sgt. Atkins says police are seeing a lot more of them as of late.<\/p>\n
“They’ll post pictures and then maybe put a price that’s too good to be true, so they get more attention to that and then they really pressure people to put the money down,” Atkins said.<\/p>\n
These ads are popping up on social media and on Zillow. Sometimes they have suspicious payment methods like Cash App, Zelle or gift cards.<\/p>\n
Atkins and Byrne say take the extra steps to verify if the post is real before sending money.<\/p>\n
“The County of Berks has the assessment tool, a parcel assessment tool, that you can go on, search the address of the property that you’re looking into and see who owns it, see if that name is connected to the person that’s advertising,” said Byrne.<\/p>\n
“The best way to avoid this, potentially becoming a victim, is to try to see the property in person,” Atkins added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. – Reading Police say rental scams are on the rise. “Often, when it seems too good…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[21009,21008,28,128,130,129,1751,21012,21011,21010],"class_list":["post-33507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-assessment-tool","tag-confidence-tricks","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-reading-police","tag-rental-scams","tag-scams","tag-zillow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}