Miklos
« Je donne mon avis non comme bon mais comme mien. » — Michel de Montaigne

The following ad appeared in the Paris rooms & shares section of Craigslist:

EUR600 / 600ft² – Lovely home available
Date: 2011-12-01, 8:29AM CET
Reply to: hous-rzmhx-2729837589@craigslist.org

My apartment is located in a very nice environment.The apartment is furnished and well decorated.The deposit is 600eur and the rent charge is 700eur inclusive.Contact for details.

Looks nice? Sure: a whole apartment in a “very nice environment” for less than the average price of a room to share in a mediocre neighborhood of the City of Lights! Who’d believe it?

Well, you’d better not. For one thing, it is posted in the wrong section of Craigslist. Then it contains no real and useful information at all about the apartment. Additionally, the rent as announced in the text does not fit the one announced in the title. And last but not least, it was posted verbatim (including the erroneous punctuation) in the Amsterdam section of the expatriates.com site today too, with a very slight change:

EUR 600 / month – 1 BR – Lovely home available for rent
From: joseffina_me@yahoo.com
Date: Thursday, December 01, 2011
Category: Apartments/Flats/Houses
Region: Amsterdam (Amsterdam)
Description: My apartment is located in a very nice environment.The apartment is furnished and well decorated.The deposit is 700eur and the rent charge is 600eur inclusive.Contact for details.

In case you think it might be a coincidence: upon writing to the Paris announcer, one receives a reply from the joseffina_me@yahoo.com address mentioned in the Amsterdam ad. Here is what he writes:

Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 hh:mm:ss -0800 (PST)
From: Josef Van Schaik <joseffina_me@yahoo.com>

Hi

Thank you and i appreciate your interest in my apartment.I hope you will like my apartment and eventually rent it.Here are some important information about the apartment.

1.The apartment cost 600eur per month and 700eur for security deposit refundable when moving out

2.The apartment is located in a very safe place and has easy access to transportation and fun centers.It is located at 11 Boulevard de La Tour Maubourg, Paris, France.

3.The facilities you enjoy includes the following;Internet access,gas,electricity,water,phone,air conditioning,fridge,washing ma­chine,oven,ca­ble tv and dvd and a dedicated parking space.All include in the rent,no extra charge.

4.The apartment is already furnished and there are no room mates.The apartment can be rented unfurnished too.

5.The total size of the apartment is 45sqm and the bedroom is about 18sqm.

About me,i am the owner of this apartment which i inherited from my mother.I am French and British because my father was British.I was in France last four months.That was when i was there to check up on my mother and that was when i first rented the apartment out.Now my current tenant is due to move out and i need someone to take over the apartment.The apartment is available for practically long time.

Kindly get back to me if you like the apartment and would love to proceed in renting it.We are looking forward to hearing from you.

Regards

For those readers who might be puzzled to see a “joseffina” be identified as a Josef von Schaik, they may be even more puzzled by the fact that this doesn’t sound like a British name (notwithstanding the explanation in the letter) but like a Dutch one. With due cause: this is the name of a now-defunct Dutch politician which must have been chosen by Mr X in conjunction with the Amsterdam version of his scam…

Last but not least, Mr X is most certainly neither French nor British, as his email was sent from Nigeria (IP 82.128.81.89), like many of the scams in this section of Craigslist. Curiously enough, the building he pretends the apartment is in (11 bd de Latour Maubourg) was owned by a company set by an ex Nigerian minister who was convicted in absentia in France of aggravated money laundering (source: Rue89)

Later in the day, here is what Mr X wrote, still from Nigeria:

Thank you for getting back to me.I want you to know more about me.

My apartment means a lot to me and i really would appreciate your care for it.I have a certain procedures in renting my apartment out which involves going into rental agreement and later the posting of the documents you need in order to stay in the apartment out if you eventually rent the apartment.

Am sorry that you can not meet me for now but you will soon.So for the viewing of the apartment,i want you to meet the incumbent tenant i told you that is occupying the apartment at the moment.You will be able to view the apartment on my behalf and get back to me as soon as you are satisfied with the apartment which am sure you will be.

Below is the contact of the incumbent tenant renting the apartment at the moment

Name James

Address..My apartment address

Mail jamesrowe1978@hotmail.com

After your viewing with James,get back to me so that you can eventually rent the apartment by going into rental agreement with me.After this has been done,all you need to do is get the keys from James and you may start living in the apartment.+447045765578 that is my number if you need to talk.Registration is possible with the rental agreement contract.You could stay in the apartment for as long as 7 years.

Do have a nice day ahead.

This exact mail has been quoted a month ago in a Dutch forum (probably in relation with that Amsterdam scam). As to the phone number which is mentioned here, it was also used in a “Microsoft Lottery Company” scam.

For those innocent ones who, like I first did, wonder how Mr X could be physically in Nigeria and have a UK phone number, a cursory search on the Internet reveals many web sites which show how one can get one’s own UK phone number with “free divert service” to Nigeria.

Enter “James Rowe”, the “incumbent tenant” according to Mr X. Here is what he replied to a request to see the apartment:

Hello

I am sorry but i have to tell you that it is a bit late that you are mailing me though it is not your fault,its just when you have contact with the Landlord.I moved out 2days back but officially i still have four days in the apartment.I had to go because i got a job offer in Germany and that is the most important thing that will happen to me in this year.I am sorry but please feel free if there is anything i can do for you.Besides,i still have the keys of the apartment which i plan on mailing it to the landlord in 2 days time.He doesnt know i left yet.Did you rent the apartment already and if there is anything i could help with,you could ask me.

This email, with the same typographical characteristics as Mr X’s (punctuation, case, etc.), was also sent from Nigeria (IP 82.128.3.177, same provider as Mr X’s), so it won’t cost him too much to “mail” the keys back to his “landlord”. In a later email, he advises me to speak with Mr X. (after all, he provided me with a phone number), who, he affirms, is in the UK while he is already in Germany.

Having told Mr X. that his tenant had left, he replied that he “never knew that he already left”, adding:

Now visiting maybe very difficult but i would like to ask you to be patient while i discuss with my lawyer here what best course of action can be done now.while you are waiting,maybe you could take your time and examine the neighbourhood where my apartment is located because it maybe be that i have to send the keys to you by mail.

Hm… laying the ground to ask for my name and address? I tell him that I have already been there, and would like to visit the building, at least. His reply:

I sent you the address in my formal email and it is located on the second floor apartment 7d.

You bet. And what’s the code to get into the building?

In reply (this time sent from IP 93.186.23.81 on the Blackberry network, a number associated also with other scams and most probably using the “free divert service” I mentioned above), Mr X proposed not the code for the building but the following:

In renting the apartment,we will both sign a rental agreement contract which will be prepared by my lawyer here then i will post the keys of the apartment plus other necessary documents to you after your first month rent and the deposit payment has been confirmed.PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU WILL RECEIVE THE AGREEMENT BEFORE ANY FORM OF PAYMENT WILL BE MADE.THAT IS YOUR GUARRANTY.

He then asks for all possible personal info, so as “to prepare the rental agreement”. In other words: send monies to unidentified individuals living in an indeterminate country for goods you have never seen nor have proof of their existence, then…

I express my worry to Mr X. As he thinks I am a good bait, he sends a reassuring message:

Yes of course there maybe false agreement as so on.They will always ask you to pay through western union or money gram which they know it is untraceable.I told you the money will be delivered into my lawyers bank account and not mine for safety.When you have the agreement,you could decide not to go ahead with the signing if you dont feel confident in the agreement.Another thing i can offer you is that you make just the deposit payment of 700eur to my lawyers account and when you have the keys,you could balance up the remaining 600eur.The consultate idea could be a lot of stress just for an apartment.If you think all my condition and solution is not ok with you,you may go ahead with the other apartment you find.

Fatal mistake, he is so much in a hurry to get a deal that he sends it from Nigeria (IP 41.203.64.128), as he had done in the beginning before switching to his Blackberry net.

Words, words, words. So, to quote Beckett, “Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended.”