Scams

There are, as there are across all media, various scams going on using this web site. Whilst I do try to block advertisements which are scams I cannot guarantee to catch them all

Be suspicious if:

• You are asked to part with any money at all, perhaps under the guise of various fees or charges or deposits, before you have seen an advertised property, and/or before you have met the agent or landlord, and/or before you have a signed rental agreement.
• You reply to an ad and the advertiser says "that room has gone, but I've got this other one...".
• You are asked to make payments using strange and unusual mechanisms such as money transfer schemes. A genuine agent or landlord will allow you to pay by cheque or standing order to a bank account of a UK person or company which you can check out online (and not just on their own web site).
• The agent or landlord only gives a mobile phone number (it could be a disposable mobile from a supermarket) or a number like 01223 9xxxxx, +44 1223 9xxxxx, etc - the 01223 might make you think it's a genuine Cambridge landline number, but the initial 9 indicates it's actually a VOIP number, which could be a disposable number set up for a scam. A real Cambridge agent will have a real Cambridge landline number; many (but not all) landlords will.
• The description of the property, combined with the price, sound too good to be true.

One common approach is for the scammer to use a one-time disposable email address for an advertisement, and if you reply to the ad they direct you to a web site and then carry on the scam using various different email addresses.

It's not possible for me to keep up to date with all the web sites they use, but one that's been reported to me is:

http://rooms4rentcambridge.com/

Now that I've published this address here they'll probably change it. At present they have web sites that look like this:

so be suspicious if you see anything like that, but of course they'll probably change that as well.