Real estate scammers in Brussels

Just weeks before Brussels will get flooded by international trainees and interns beginning their work for the EU institutions, real estate scammers are shaping a new way of doing business.

Present on all real estate websites, scammers post fake announcements of flats available for renting with ridiculously low prices, located in the most expensive areas of Brussels. They use multiple accounts, all registered under names such as Melissa or Jane, to post messages about rooms available for renting, with no pictures, but similar prices and all in perfect shape and with many utilities included. They usually pick female names for their visible account nickname and leave not much details about the apartment itself. Normally they do place the offer on a map, in the heart of Brussels or around the European institutions, and write a short sentence like:

“I have a flat in center of Brussels, Belgium”

I’ve got to find out about this scam practice while looking for an appartment in Brussels myself. I’ve registered on all of the real estate websites and started searching. Some of the offers were really good, and for an unexperienced searcher not familiar yet with the accomodation prices in the heart of Brussels, some of the offers were pretty tempting. So I send messages to the owners, glad they weren’t some agency ready to rob be off all of my savings, and got the fastest replies ever.

Normally they contact you back and their message is formulated in a very familiar way, leaving the impression that this owner is such a nice person. They give details about them and their family and even explain how they’ve got the appartment, adding a lot of information about the facilities included in the small prize.

After exchanging emails for about two or three days, when they agree to almost anything you ask, they’ll bring up the matter of the contract and deposit. They usually ask you to deposit 600 euro sent by Western Union in cash and explain you in detail how the contract will look like. The moment you ask to schedule a visit to see the apartment, the owners will start explaining that they’re not in the country and that they have another offer from someone else, so the first one to send the deposit will get the flat. If you insist, they will show you pictures of the apartment. They are normally professional pictures that reveal rooms strangely similar to interior design projects in specialised magazines (see on the side).

Stories differ from one another. Some say they come from a rich family in France and that they own this apartment in Brussels, but they’re away in this time of the year. Others will explain their parents got sick and they had to leave the country.

The phenomenon is quite widely spread, so real estate websites have already placed warnings on their front page. Appartager.be has done this already, by showing the title “Attention aux arnaques” on their website (circled in the picture below), where they point out tips on how to distinguish fake announcements from real ones.

These tips include a warning on never sending money through Western Union or in cash to anyone before seeing an apartment, or they raise a question mark over the “too perfect” pictures.

The begining of a life in a different city than yours is always difficult and these scam businesses have developed allarmingly over the last years, once the working markets have opened and more and more people have the opportunity to work abroad and, as a consequence, need a place to live.

Bloggers from different cities in Europe (such as Paris or Barcelona) reported similar stories, and some even made up a list of names and emails of scammers and posted it online, so that possible future victims could use it.

If this every happened to you too, then please leave a comment and tell us your story.