Great studio for a decent price, found on Facebook Marketplace. An old woman says she had an operation so she can't meet up in person. She has a daughter who lives in a city 3 hours away by car, and drives to the studio to show us around. The last person that tried to lease the studio didn't show up to this meeting, according to the woman, which meant her busy daughter lost ~6 hours+ to driving. Because of this, the owner wants my partner to show she's "serious" about showing up and affording the place, and the way to do that is to give her the first and last month of rent before the meeting. In Canada there's a thing called interact e-transfer that easily lets people send one another money, and it has a password option so that the other person doesn't have access to the money until they get the password for the transfer. In theory as long as we send the money without the password, she wouldn't get the money before we send the lease, but this whole request is unusual.
some weirdnesses:
We originally thought we wouldn't be able to use interact e-transfer, and said so, and the owner said we could use STEAM CARDs or ITHUNES CARDS instead, and said she's been using them to transfer money for years. That's potentially scammer-coded.
She has some weird emails, mixes up details about meeting time (first it was monday or tuesday at 6pm, then it was at 7pm sharp), and her email changed from an email exchange to the next, from a typoed version of her name to a non-typoed with a @live.ca ending.
She has never shared the address after 15+ message exchanges
She in a hurry to rent the place, wants to get this done by end of weekend
However, ig it's a pretty elaborate story for a scam, and seems within the normal distribution of non-scammy fb marketplace interactions, and interact e-transfer seems to reduce the risks involved a lot.
Resolution: We'll make sure the password thing can't be bypassed, "send" the money, set up the meeting, see if the place is as advertised, and if I judge that it was a scam, the market will resolve YES, and NO otherwise. I won't bet.
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I've often heard that scammers will intentionally misspell words and use incorrect grammer specifically because they only want people who are willing to overlook issues to respond, it's not worth the time and effort to trick someone who is smart/prudent enough to notice small details like that when you can instead spend that time and effort finding more people who will skim over all the relevant details.
Update: 30 minutes after I sent the password-protected transfer, she replied saying she didn't get it (and that I needed to send it again). 10 minutes after that, I received an unusual email from interact asking me to confirm the transfer:
I do not want to click anything about that. I have to admit this looks pretty scammy. I could not find online whether interact ever sends this kind of confirmation email, but I'm assuming they don't send it. I dunno whether it's safe to click that link and I'm curious what happens if I do but uh yeah this is market relevant info I guess.. I think my money is safe though.
>I'm assuming they don't send it
they sure don't from the domain be-rater.online
I have sent the money (password protected) and we're setting up the studio visit. Hopefully it looks great and the owner is shown to be socially challenged and that explains the scam vibes and we get a great studio at a great price. Otherwise they might just ghost us and won't get nothin'. if I get scammed I allow you all to laugh but I think I'll be fineeeeeeee.
I'd try to get official verification that this person actually owns the property. It seems like everything this "old lady" has done could be done by someone who doesn't live in Canada, wants to remain anonymous, doesn't have a daughter, etc. Try google searching the photos posted or using this website: