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Are You Renting … or Squatting and Don’t Know It?

You spot a “For Rent” ad on Craigslist, then meet the rental agent, who hands you a contract and keys. Time to move in! Sounds legit, right? Maybe, or maybe not, thanks to an increasingly pervasive new scam in which con artists pose as agents and then “rent out” vacant homes.

The sad and scary reality, though, is that whoever falls for this ruse is living there illegally—aka squatting, plain and simple.

While anyone could fall for this hoax, the most vulnerable target are people who are struggling financially, perhaps even homeless, and desperate for cheap rent. So when they spot a Craigslist ad for a whole house for $300 a month, they bite. Sure, some might suspect this too-good-to-be-true rental arrangement isn’t legal and decide to move forward anyway.

But then again, some might truly believe in their heart of hearts that finally, they’ve found a home—that is, until the cops kick them out.

According to the Las Vegas Sun, such cons have become surprisingly common in their sparkling city—a place where dreams die a particularly hard death and shuttered homes are familiar sights. In Las Vegas,  2.1% of homes, or 13,360 properties, sit vacant (compared with a 1.6% national average, or 1.3 million unoccupied homes nationwide).

The rackets that lure people into these homes can be astonishingly complex. Crooks pore over property records online to find houses repossessed by lenders, or merely drive through neighborhoods looking for boarded-up windows or other signs of abandonment. Then they break in, change the locks, and clean the place up. Afterward, they lure in their prey by pretending to be real estate agents posting ads. One fraudster cited by the Sun sported various wigs, business cards, and aliases to change up her look.

Wigs, really?

From there, these “agents” meet their prospective tenants in public places such as coffee shops and hand them keys along with a bogus rental agreement—in exchange for a fee, anywhere from a few hundred bucks on up. Last year, cops found two squatters who claimed they’d paid someone nearly $132,000 in cash to live in their six-bedroom house!

And legit homeowners in these neighborhoods aren’t happy about it, either: Last year, Las Vegas police received 4,458 squatter-related calls—up 24% from 2014 and 169% from 2012.

“They are everywhere,” Police Officer Jose Martinez told the Sun. “There’s a very good chance that you have a squatter within a half-mile of your own house right now.”

Making matters worse is the fact that police can’t always effectively crack down on squatting, since it’s typically viewed as a landlord-tenant issue for the civil courts. In Las Vegas, local cops can only charge violators with trespassing or lodging without the owner’s consent—both misdemeanors. Yet local housing advocates have proposed a new law, Assembly Bill 386, that would turn squatting into a more serious offense, from a gross misdemeanor to a felony.

While no one should be allowed to live in a home illegally, we do hope that any ensuing crackdown—in Las Vegas or elsewhere—differentiates between squatters who know they’re squatting and those who actually believe they’re renting a house. After all, many of the 610,042 homeless Americans may be so desperate for a place to live, they’re willing to believe anything, and many of these black-market entrepreneurs’ schemes seem pretty convincing. On top of that, they’re taking money from the homeless, who just want a place to live like everyone else. That’s a whole new low.

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More from realtor.com: Is It Smarter to Rent or Buy?

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