Residential fraud: discover the trick in time

A young woman looking for a home narrowly avoids the scheme of scammers who tried to deceive her.

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Fanny Leblanc thought she had found the perfect apartment in Terrebonne, in Lanaudière.

“Next to the mall, everything includes: animals, appliances… the whole ‘all inclusive’ deal! It was incredible,” she told TVA Nouvelles on Sunday.

Then I called the alleged owner who responded almost immediately.

“He sent me a nice message, well done, and it was well written. It was basically persuasive. I made it clear it didn’t look junk.”

But the fraudster asked him to pay the first monthly payment even before the first visit to the apartment. But at the insistence of the owner, I questioned things.

“I put my foot on the brake just in time. It really started to get pretty suspicious. Worst of all, it was: Give me your location, go ahead and do the transfer and send me a picture.”

Although she avoided the worst, Fanny LeBlanc said she fears people in an emergency to find new housing will fall into the trap.

“People who can be more desperate than us, when it comes to finding accommodation, and you have five days to find accommodation before moving, I would have been scammed,” she said.

In the midst of a housing crisis, scammers compete in their imaginations to corner people looking for a new home.

Tenants’ associations also called for vigilance and denounced the inaction of elected officials who, in their view, are slow to halt the housing crisis in the Greater Montreal region.

You should know that four years ago, these promises were also on the table. Denis Coderre’s promises so far aren’t clear, so we don’t have many details. He’s talking about 50,000 housing units, but we don’t know what share of that housing will be social housing, affordable housing, and private housing like apartments,” lamented Maxime Roy Allard of the Housing Commissions and Tenants Associations of Quebec (RCLALQ).

The organizations promised to follow up on candidates in the municipal elections until November 7.

According to them, the construction of 22,500 new social housing units is necessary to end the crisis, as well as the creation of a registry that allows tenants to know the prices of prepaid rents.

– Based on information from Véronique Dubé

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