Esti and Ryan Brooks thought they’d found the perfect site in Miami Beach to hold their destination wedding this summer: a five-bedroom house on the water with room enough for family to stay and a giant back patio for the intimate reception.
After sending a friend to check the home out, the couple wired $6,300 to Curtis Duffin, the agent who had listed the rental online.
Then they got to town, days before the June wedding, and Duffin stopped returning messages, according to a police report. The home’s owner said he had no idea about any rental. And the pair was confronted with the “for poorer” part of marital life before they even said their vows.
It’s kind of embarrassing because I’ve never fallen for a scam before,” said Esti Brooks, who lives in San Francisco but used to call Miami home. “I just can’t believe this would happen.”
When questioned about the case via email, a man who represented himself as Duffin said: “Not sure what happened, kindly let me know . . . I was told the [sic] used the home so never followed up.”
There’s little data available to show how often such situations happen, but as the marketplace for vacation rentals has grown in recent years, so has the opportunity for scam artists to prey on travelers seeking a bargain.
Earlier this year, Key West saw a spike in fraudulent vacation rental reports, said city spokeswoman Alyson Crean. She said something like 30 complaints came in, some from people who suspected fraud and others from people who had lost money, mostly linked to homes posted on Craigslist.
Police charged a man with fraud in one of the cases, but haven’t made arrests in any of the others.
“Because it’s done on the Internet, it’s even hard to know where the jurisdiction is,” Crean said. “They can live anywhere and they can post this and have [victims] send the money anywhere.”
Seth Kugel knows that all too well. As writer of the Frugal Traveler blog for the New York Times, he is always seeking a bargain — like the cheap studio he found this January in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood. “It didn’t even cross my mind that it would be fake. Then when I learned more about how these frauds work, it became instantly obvious,” Kugel said in a phone interview.
Scammed out of about $600 (via wire transfer), Kugel wrote about the experience as a cautionary tale. His case was closed with no arrests. “It was a very hard article to write,” he said. “It’s like the head of some burglar alarm company getting burglarized because he installed his own alarm incorrectly. I’m the person it shouldn’t happen to.”
The Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, received 6,873 reports of rental fraud in 2010, according to Internet crime analyst Elizabeth Walling. That’s out of more than 303,000 total complaints.
And in the 2010 Consumer Sentinel Network report released by the Federal Trade Commission, which includes complaints filed with government agencies and watchdog organizations, 18,836 incidents involving travel, vacations and timeshare plans were listed. That’s only about a percent of all complaints logged.
While fewer than one in a thousand listings are removed due to fraud on popular websites owned by HomeAway — which include VRBO.com and HomeAway.com — senior vice president Alexis de Belloy warned: “There is always that risk. The risk can be outright fraud or just instances of a double booking or a property that’s been foreclosed.”
HomeAway has a financial relationship with property owners, a few hundred customer support staff and a policy that owners must allow reviews — positive or negative. The company offers a free guarantee that covers as much as $1,000 in losses and paid insurance policies that range between $39 and $149 to cover as much as a $10,000 hit.
On HomeAway.com alone, 1,600 properties are listed for rent online — up from 445 five years ago.
“As awareness grows of a category, it becomes even more important to make sure that you’re booking from a reputable site,” de Belloy said. “Because as the category grows, the awareness raises for everyone.”
Travel consumer advocate Christopher Elliott said he gets reports about rental fraud every few months, and typically, by the time he hears about a problem, the victim has no way to recoup the losses. He advises travelers to go down a common-sense checklist: Don’t wire money, check reviews, compare photos to Google’s street view, see if renters belong to trade organizations.
Los Angeles Times travel editor Catharine Hamm says she just wasn’t suspicious enough when choosing a last-minute venue for her wedding in Oahu after an initial location fell through.
“The alarm bells didn’t go off in my head,” she said in a telephone interview.
She wired $4,750 to a rental agent named Amanda, who disappeared with the money before the 2008 wedding. Hamm spent a year tracking down the woman’s background and criminal past. Eventually, a different case landed the woman behind bars, Hamm wrote in a 2009 story about the ordeal.
“I always assumed that people who got scammed were knuckleheads,” she wrote. “Now I know they are people just like me.”
Esti and Ryan Brooks would like a similar end to their story. Though a South Beach hotel gave them a venue for the wedding ceremony free of charge, they still want to get their money back. They’ve filed a report with Miami police and are hoping for an investigation and an arrest.
Said Ryan Brooks: “I’m going to continue to keep pursuing this until something happens.”
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