Scammed on the rental market: €2,800 lighter and still no roof over your head
Due to the housing shortage, international students are often the victims of scammers. They try to charge international students money for a room that does not exist. “Because you are new in the country, you don't know the system completely. You are easy prey for scammers.”
Sinem Şahin (22, political science) moved to Amsterdam from Germany more than two years ago to study. Finding housing wasn't a problem. In her first year, she ended up in a room through the UvA Housing Service. It was easy for her because relatively few international students came to Amsterdam because of the pandemic. When she had to move out of that apartment after a year, Sinem and her then-boyfriend looked for an apartment to live in together.
She was scammed when she and her boyfriend were looking for a new place to live. They lost around €2,800; that hit them hard. “I felt naive,” she says on the phone.
A fake Airbnb
Sinem and her boyfriend mainly used Pararius and UniPlaces and sometimes Funda to find a house. There they saw an apartment they wanted to look at. A few weeks later, they got an e-mail back from someone who said he was the owner. Before he would give them the address of the house for viewing, he asked Sinem and her boyfriend to make a down payment through Airbnb.
“My ex-boyfriend decided to transfer an initial deposit of €3,000. We thought it was normal to transfer a payment first and only then get the exact address,” says Sinem. What she and her boyfriend did not know is that the site that they thought was Airbnb was a fake website.
“We only realized we had been scammed when we received a request from that website to transfer another €2,500.” Simen contacted Airbnb and customer service told her that the site she had transferred money to was fake. “But ‘very convincingly fake.’”
1. Go see the property before you pay or sign anything. Can't or shouldn't? Then it's probably a scammer.
2. Take a friend with you to look at the apartment if you don't feel comfortable.
3. Read up on your rental rights regarding administrative costs or key money, for example. “Make use of agencies such as Asva and Stichting !Woon," says van Zeeland. “That way you can make sure you end up in the right place.”
Sinem is not the only student who has been cheated. More and more scammers are taking advantage of the acute housing shortage among international students in particular to extort money from them. Bor van Zeeland, housing board member of the Amsterdam Student Union Asva, has also observed this. He regularly hears that students have been swindled while searching for a room.
“If something is in high demand, scammers take advantage of it, as is currently the case in the housing market. For example, you see students having to pay a deposit for a room that ultimately doesn't exist.” But landlords, he says, also try to extort money from students in other ways. “For example, they say that students have to pay key money, an excessive deposit or contract money, and threaten to give the room to someone else if students don't pay it. This also has to do with the fact that these students are often unaware of their rights.”
Escaping the dance
Sri Divya (19, economics and business) realized just in time that she was dealing with a scammer. When she moved to Amsterdam from India for her studies, she, like Sinem, first lived in a room she found through UvA Housing Service. When she had to move out, she started looking for other housing.
“Because you are new in the country, you don't know the system completely. You are easy prey for scammers. For example, I saw a furnished studio for €500 a month and didn't realize it was too good to be true. The so-called landlord also gave me the address of the property, so I thought it was legitimate.”
But at the very last minute, Sri choose not to make the down payment because the landlord did not answer her questions properly. “He communicated very oddly. He kept calling me back after five minutes with incomplete answers. That made me realize that it was not a real property.”
Although Sri did not lose any money, she finds it annoying that there are so many scammers operating in the housing market. “Those people are just taking advantage of the fact that the housing shortage is so extreme. It's already exhausting to look for housing. The possibility of being scammed makes it even more difficult.”
Sri luckily found another room. Sinem went to live with relatives for a while “partly because I was getting tight on funds because of the money I had lost.” Recently, however, she decided to start looking again.
