The Rise of the Rental Scam signal: Why NYC's Housing Market Keeps Creating New Targets

From broker alerts to FBI data, a quiet industry of scam prevention has grown alongside one of the nation's most competitive rental markets and it tells us something important about urgency, trust, and how we search for home.

The Apartment That Wasn't There In the summer of 2024, Amanda Baum, an agent with Corcoran, discovered that one of her own listings had been duplicated word-for-word on another platform. The photos were hers. The description was hers. The address was real. Everything looked legitimate except the person posting it wasn't her, and the inquiry emails were going somewhere else entirely. Baum had witnessed, firsthand, how seamlessly a fake listing could be assembled and how quickly it could spread across the internet,...