The French authorities have discovered a new kind of scam concerning the payment of your rent. If you have received a letter from your landlord or lessor, check these elements before acting.
If you rent an apartment or a house, you must sometimes have contact with your owner or lessor. Whether to report a delay in paying the rent, or a problem in the accommodation. For their part, the owner or lessor may also contact you, for example to inform you that future work will be carried out in the residence. Generally, these are fairly formal exchanges which are carried out by SMS or email. It is therefore difficult to spot a scam as a tenant, especially when the criminals pretend, as if nothing had happened, to be your landlord or the person in charge of your lease. And yet, we must always remain vigilant, especially since a new scam of this type has currently been revealed by the site cybermalveillance.gouv.fr.
It takes the form of a simple email which would have been sent by the owner, the lessor or the accounting department of the agency. The subject of the message, which is quite summary, concerns the rent of the accommodation: you are informed of a change in bank details for the payment of the rent, or failure to pay. So far, nothing alarming in short, because it could possibly happen. Except that the content of the email should alert the tenant.
After placing the polite forms, the scammers ask the tenant, without naming them, to make a payment for the rent. The tone of urgency is always used. In one of the fraudulent emails, the thieves provide a bank statement (RIB) on which all transfers must now be made. In the other, they urge the occupant of the accommodation to regularize their situation as quickly as possible using the new RIB. In both cases, it is a rent embezzlement scam, which aims to extract money from you.
How to spot it? According to the observations of the authorities, each email variant has an impersonal character. The tenant’s last name is not recorded, as is the address of the accommodation and the identity of the lessor or owner. If you notice this, the first instinct to have is not to respond to the message. Then, most importantly, do not pay under any circumstances! If you have any doubts, contact your landlord or the agency handling your rental, via their numbers if you have them or via their contact details on the rental contract, to find out what is really going on. If you have given in, alert your bank as quickly as possible to suspend the transfers, and file a complaint with the gendarmerie or the police.