The Edinburgh flat fraud

James Sherwood was nearly scammed, and is afraid you might be too

This article isn’t funny, or particularly about comedy. But it’s probably quite important that you read it – if you’re planning on spending August in Edinburgh.

Have you got a really good bargain on a flat in Edinburgh this year? It’s possible that you have been the victim of a scam. My potential Edinburgh flatmates and I narrowly escaped losing a lot of money. And it’s possible that many others weren’t so lucky.

One of my Edinburgh flatmates put a message on some internet forum or other, asking if anyone had a flat they were trying to rent out in August. A reply arrived, offering a large, quality, central property for roughly a quarter of the price we expected to pay. Our eyeballs turned into dollar signs, and there was much rejoicing.

Slowly, we all started to get a bit suspicious. The sender of this email was saying some odd things. He seemed to think there were ‘tube stations’ in Edinburgh, a city he claimed to have lived in until recently. He said he had moved to Newport, without saying which one, when perhaps most UK residents would have clarified whether they meant south Wales, or the Isle of Wight, or one of the other eight Newports of which we British are so rightly proud.

He had sent us a description of the flat, written in perfect Estate Agent language. I noticed that there was a spelling mistake in it. This triggered my long-dormant detective instinct, and I googled that exact phrase, complete with the spelling mistake. (I am inordinately proud of this wheeze.) The phrase appeared on many property websites, and some of them were describing the property we had been offered, including the photos we had been sent. My Edinburgh flatmate rang one of the estate agents who had the property listed, and asked them who owned this flat. It was not our Newport-dwelling correspondent.

So, someone is taking property details from websites, and contacting anyone asking for an Edinburgh flat, claiming that they own it. They will request a deposit, then disappear. They may well be doing the same thing hundreds of times with the same details. At the beginning of August, I may well go down to the address in question and see if a small crowd of scammed Fringe-performers is forming.

We only spotted it because he made some basic mistakes. If he had asked for a price closer to the market norm (and if he had not unwittingly targeted someone with such an unhealthy interest in spelling), we might not have rumbled him.

He was smart enough to offer us a flat in a building that actually exists. I know of people who have been victim of a similar scam by being offered a flat in “23 McTavish Square” only to find that McTavish Square has only 22 addresses.

Crimestoppers aren’t interested, because a crime has not been committed. (Telling lies to strangers and asking them for money sounds a lot like fraud to me, but then I’m not a lawyer). This means no investigation can start, and there is no way of finding out whether the fraud has been successfully perpetrated, possibly many times, on others.

Which is why I wanted to write this article – to see if anyone is quietly rubbing their hands in bargain-fuelled glee, unaware that, although they are expecting a flat, the flat isn’t expecting them. Ask your Edinburgh-bound friends where they are staying, and how they found it. If their story starts, ‘Some bloke emailed me’ you might want to direct them towards this article.