One in four international students fell for a scam while looking for housing

Looking for a place from another country, in a hurry and without being able to view it, is the perfect setting for a scam. This is not a hunch: it has been measured.

The figures

The housing report by the Erasmus Student Network and the European Students’ Union, based on 8,912 answers from international students collected from November 2022, found that:

• 25% had fallen for a scam while looking for accommodation;
• in Italy, the share was above 38%.

One in four. And that does not count those who nearly fell for one.

The signs that keep coming up

We cross-checked alerts from the Irish police, the city of Ghent, the University of Tübingen and the student press in Utrecht and Rotterdam. The signs are almost always the same:

1. You are asked to pay before viewing. The most common one: a deposit, a reservation or a “holding fee”, and then the advertiser vanishes.
2. The advertiser is abroad and always has an excuse not to show you the place. Some scammers also use stolen identities for flats that do exist.
3. You are asked for a copy of your passport or ID before meeting, supposedly to prepare the contract. It is used to steal your identity.
4. The bank account is in another country. In one case reported by the Irish police, the deposit for a short-term let went to a French account after contact over WhatsApp with a British number.
5. A payment method you cannot get back: cash, crypto, Western Union, MoneyGram or peer-to-peer payment apps. In Rotterdam, in 2018, Erasmus Magazine spoke to victims who had lost between €1,000 and €1,500.
6. The price is far below other ads in the same area.
7. Photos copied from other ads or from stock image sites.
8. A well-known website guarantees nothing. In Ireland, fake ads have been found on legitimate platforms.

What to do

• Do not pay anything before you have seen the place, in person or through someone you trust, and before you have a contract with the landlord’s details.
• Do not send documents until you have met the landlord and know who they are.
• If you pay, use a credit card or a bank method that lets you dispute the payment, and keep the receipt.
• Run a reverse image search on the photos with your browser’s image search. If they show up in another city or at another price, that is a very strong sign.
• Run the ad through the Erasmus Kit checker. It works in seven languages, stores nothing you paste and tells you which signs it finds, never that an ad is “safe”.

If you are house hunting this year, start by working out how much money you will need up front: the pressure to pay a deposit quickly is exactly what scammers count on.