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.