As a rental home marketer, I use Craigslist as part of my daily marketing activities. Also, as I have been doing this for the best part of a decade, I know what home rental rates are for a given area. So, when I see adverts in the “apartments/housing for rent” section advertised for $850, with a photo of a home that would rent for easily double that amount, big red flags are immediately waving in front of my face.
Above is an example of such a listing, from which I took the phone number and Googled it, and several scam reporting websites appeared at the top of the listings. The phone number was not an exact match, the last four numbers were different, this is a good example of one of the types of scams on Craigslist.
I have not called the number, this is speculation on my part, on whether the above listing is the same as the rent2ownclub.org scam. Rent-2-Own Club appears to be an entity that is a funnel to Lexington Law, whose specialty is credit repair. In this scam, a person calls the listed number and is told that to take advantage of this rent-to-own offer, they’d have to sign up to Lexington Law for a recurring fee of $130, who then will give the victim a confirmation number, to give back to rent2ownclub.org. At this point, rent2ownclub.org will promise to send you a selection of listings and that a realtor will be reaching out soon after, and that’s as far as it goes, meanwhile, Lexington Law continues to charge their monthly fee.
Some of the reviews of rent2ownclub.org on other websites state that even if they refuse to take up the offer for credit recovery, their personal number, gained through caller-ID is sold to marketers, and the victim is bombarded with all sorts of marketing calls, including harassing calls from rent2ownclub.org.
If you visit rent2ownclub.org, and look at their properties, and their associated prices, you soon realize they have stolen photos from the Internet, no addresses are given, not even the city where the house is located, no other details other than year built, bedrooms, bathrooms and square footage. It states “Call us NOW, Get information about the Second Chance Program and pass fast qualification procedure. Our friendly team will guide you through the whole process.” – despite this, there is no phone number or any kind of contact form on the website, it’s literally a single page website with named anchor links.
I would advise anyone to steer clear of calling numbers on Craigslist for rental homes, the listing website is a scammer’s paradise these days, most legitimate rental homeowners and marketers abandoned the website long ago. I would love to do so myself, but my employer wants me to continue to use Craigslist.
Google rent2ownclub.org yourself to read what people are saying about this company!