It didn't take long to find an apartment that perfectly suited her needs, both in terms of features and price.
Image of the ad on Wallapop
After a brief discussion, they decided to contact the advertiser through the platform. The next day, the alleged owner of the apartment asked our protagonist to contact her via WhatsApp, claiming that communication would be faster.
Screenshots of the conversationScreenshots of the conversation
Once the communication was established, the alleged owner indicated that the apartment was available. To pay the rent, the owner suggested they use the TripAdvisor platform, since the advertisement was supposedly also hosted there, and to do so she indicated the web address where they should make the payment. And so they did without taking into account that it could be a scam. They accessed the address and made the payment.
Screenshots of the website where a form is provided to make the paymentScreenshots of the website where a form is provided to make the payment
At this point, Diego and his friends realised the fraud, as when they tried to contact the owner of the apartment to tell her that the payment had been made, she had automatically blocked communications through the Wallapop ad. In addition, she stopped responding to WhatsApp and rejected all phone calls. To verify what they already feared, they found that the link provided to make the payment was false; it did not correspond to TripAdvisor, but was a website that impersonated the legitimate one (phishing).
Screenshots - Blocked User Message
As a last resort, they decided to create another user in the app and access the fraudulent advertisement. As before, they were asked to communicate via WhatsApp indicating the availability of the property. Since this fraud has already been reported in several forums, as well as to the affected platforms, it is no longer active at the moment, but several users have been affected by this and other similar advertisements.
Therefore, in order not to fall into this type of scam, you must be careful and follow the following recommendations:
Find out what the price of the area is. If the rent is very low (below market value), be suspicious.
If after contacting the owner, he or she forces you to maintain communication outside of the platform where the ad is hosted, remain on alert.
On the other hand, if the property owner does not identify himself or does so poorly, or does not provide documentation proving ownership of the property, discard the advertisement and look for another option to avoid problems.
