Those who rent, beware

This sounds very familiar. An agent in my office had a rental listing that
she advertised on Craig's List. She received a response from someone
purportedly relocating here from England. They sent her a check with
instructions to notify them once she had deposited it. (It was for several
thousand dollars more than the first month's rent.) She thought the check
looked funny and never deposited it and didn't hear anything else.
A few weeks later, she got an email message from a "medical student in
England transferring to the US." This exchange got a little more involved
up to the point that the person provided the agent with instructions as to
what to do with the extra funds. She was to deposit the check, then
*immediately* transfer the excess funds to his travel agent ... in Nigeria.
He even provided several locations near our office where she could go to do
the transfer. It was at this point that she told me what was going on.
I immediately recognized an "advance fee fraud" scam (there's a Fraud Alert
about this on the FBI web site:
http://www.fbi.gov/filelink.html?file=/majcases/fraud/fraud_alert.pdf). I
advised her to contact the FBI, which she did. They're so inundated with
these reports that they just told her to destroy the checks and forget about
the whole thing - they didn't even want the checks as evidence!
In their Fraud Alert, the FBI specifically cites Canada, England & Nigeria
as red flags where transferring of funds is involved.

WHAT'S MY HOME WORTH?

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