Question:
Can someone please tell me if this website is real?
?
2012-11-15 17:01:50 UTC
http://rent-inc.zzl.org/index.html

Theres an apartment I want to rent out in Sydney but the guy is currently living in the UK, so this what I have to pay my deposit for the house through, but I'm unsure if it is safe. I got an email conformation saying I can get a refund but I still don't know, with all the scams out there now days you don't really know.

How can I find out if it is real?
Has anyone used it? I can't find anything on the internet aside from their website.
Thank you!
Four answers:
Buffy Staffordshire
2012-11-16 11:35:22 UTC
100% scam.



While the website could be legit, that "owner" is a scammer and there is no condo/house/apartment for rent. Any phone number that starts with +44-70 or anything similar is not based in the United Kingdom. It is from a UK based cell phone redirect service that can be answered by anyone anywhere in the world. It is a favorite service of scammers who want to pretend to be in the United Kingdom but are really half way around the world from there.



There is only a scammer trying to steal your hard-earned money with stolen pictures of someone else's dwelling and a fake story of being out of town/state/country doing charitable works.



The next email will be from one of the scammer's fake names and free email address and will demand you pay for first month's rent and deposit, in cash, and only via Western Union or moneygram then he will "ship" the keys to you.



The scammer might suggest you "send" money to a friend or to yourself and then send a scan of the receipt to the scammer as proof you have the funds. The scammer will simply that take scanned receipt or just the MTCN# (money transfer control number) into Western Union or moneygram store and pick up the cash you thought you were sending to a friend or yourself.



Western Union and moneygram do not verify anything on the form the sender fills out, not the name, not the street address, not the country, not even the gender of the receiver, it all means absolutely nothing. The clerk will not bother to check ID and will simply hand off your cash to whomever walks in the door with the MTCN# and question/answer. Neither company will tell the sender who picked up the cash, at what store location or even in what country your money walked out the door. Neither company has any kind of refund policy, money sent is money gone forever.



Now that you have responded to a scammer, you are on his 'potential sucker' list, he will try again to separate you from your cash. He will send you more emails from his other free email addresses using another of his fake names with all kinds of stories of great places to rent, lottery winnings, millions in the bank and desperate, lonely, sexy singles. He will sell your email address to all his scamming buddies who will also send you dozens of fake emails all with the exact same goal, you sending them your cash via Western Union or moneygram.



You could post up the email address and the emails themselves that the scammer is using, it will help make your post more googlable for other suspicious potential victims to find when looking for information.



Do you know how to check the header of a received email? If not, you could google for information. Being able to read the header to determine the geographic location an email originated from will help you weed out the most obvious scams and scammers. Then delete and block that scammer. Don't bother to tell him that you know he is a scammer, it isn't worth your effort. He has one job in life, convincing victims to send him their hard-earned cash.



Whenever suspicious or just plain curious, google everything, website addresses, names used, companies mentioned, phone numbers given, all email addresses, even sentences from the emails as you might be unpleasantly surprised at what you find already posted online. You can also post/ask here and every scam-warner-anti-fraud-busting site you can find before taking a chance and losing money to a scammer.



If you google "fake apartment rental", "fraud Western Union house rent scam", "fake craigslist apartment rent scam" or something similar you will find hundreds of posts from victims and near-victims of this type of scam.
Norris
2012-11-15 19:21:22 UTC
Hello Little Monster,



I agree with Wide Glide, the only available contact detail for this merchant on their ‘Contact Us’ page http://rent-inc.zzl.org/contactUs.html is their email address/submitting a ticket. There’s no assurance/guarantee that someone will attend to your needs right away in case you’ll need immediate assistance from them.



And if you’ll ask me personally, I wouldn’t do business with them. Here’s why:



1. The merchant don’t have T&C (Terms & Conditions). And you say this is where you need to make your deposit? You are not protected as a consumer. Considering that payment transactions are involved, you wouldn’t know what your rights are and where to place yourself as a consumer since there’s no T&C.

2. Their ‘About Us’ page http://rent-inc.zzl.org/aboutUs.html doesn’t tell us anything about the merchant’s profile/background. We wouldn’t know their whereabouts.

3. And have you seen the website’s ‘Tenant Information?’ http://rent-inc.zzl.org/forTenants.html#03 ‘The keys will be delivered to your preferred address’ this is the first time I heard/read something about housing rentals.



About the website’s technicalities, check this out:



1. The domain owner, according to a domain research and monitoring website, is using a service to hide their identity. Although, this is not alarming, beware that this is the trend for majority of the high risk website owners as they wouldn’t be recognized directly.

2. The domain was registered since January 27, 2001. This shows that they have existed for a very good amount of time.

3. The registrant of the website is in the UK.

4. The Global Alexa Traffic Rank or the combination of average daily visitors and pageviews according to an online web information company http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/zzl.org# is 40,016. This shows that the website’s popularity rating is high with at least thousands of visitors each month.

5. Although, the merchant’s popularity rating is good, according to an online web review site the vendor reliability, trustworthiness, privacy & child safety ratings for http://rent-inc.zzl.org are all UNSATISFACTORY. So watch out!

6. Although the domain is currently not blacklisted according to http://rbls.org/rent-inc.zzl.org this is not an assurance/guarantee that it’s safe transacting with them.

7. Before transacting online, I strongly suggest that you always go to http://www.verify1st.com as they will not just help you determine whether the website you’re concerned with is high risk or not but they will also reveal the IDENTITY, REPUTATION & RELATIONSHIP reports. Unfortunately, out of the top 20 million reputable domains currently listed in verify1st, there’s no record found for http://rbls.org/rent-inc.zzl.org



I hope this helps. Good luck!
2012-11-15 17:09:02 UTC
i looked into it whois.net cant even find anything a bought it so i wouldn't trust it but if there are any other question put it into whois.net and it should tell you who made it



my guess is that if your going to spend money there and they don't want to be seen then there going to hide it. that's why whois.net cant retrieve any info!
Wide Glide
2012-11-15 17:08:33 UTC
ANY Legit company like that would have a Valid phone number of which that site does not, so, SCAM



LEGIT Company's in Aust.

http://www.yellowpages.com.au/search/listings?clue=Property+Management&locationClue=Sidney&selectedViewMode=LIST&emsLocationId=


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
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