No. of Recommendations: 13
Sad to report need for extreme caution on use of Furnished Finder listings. Humbly report that we got scammed this time, left to scramble last minute to find a place to stay when no one showed up to give us the keys to our rental and no on answered the phone, text, emails we sent. The property request went through FFinder, which claims to verify listings, but messaging was quickly taken off FF platform by the scammer, using the email and phone numbers provided by FF to the scammer. Unit was taken off FF after a complaint was made, but they made no effort to let those who had communications with the scammers before the removal to make us aware.
This is the "company" that was "representing" the landlord:
https://universalhousingrentals.com/ Website looks beautiful, no? And this was a nice touch:
https://www.openpr.com/news/4179866/universal-hous... The property is a valid property, but further research shows that the listing information was scaped off of what looks exactly like the sold listing in 2024 on Zillow. I see no evidence that the property is actually being rented out.
Please note that this is the third rental we do through FF, and we were quite happy with the first two. Having reached out to FF about the incident, they have requested all documents sent to them so that they can escalate the alert and at least try to do something. We will of course not see our money back.
Happily we are driving, and have the luxury of just spending a couple of days here to see our son, then head back weeks ahead of time. I don't want to think about what would have happened if we flew in.
There were some red flags along the way that I absolutely should have paid more attention to, but it was the last leg of our trip and I was thrilled to finally secure a place for it, so I ignored that danger danger Will Robinson robot voice in my head. My bad, and we are out some money, but worse is that they have copies of our drivers license and our signatures. Everything else is already on the dark web courtesy of the credit bureau hack of several years ago, so not happy to have that join the list of available info for nefarious purposes.
FF does allow for use of credit card via Key Check, for an additional fee, and not being offered this should have been the biggest flag. I just chalked it up to the way the younger set tends to avoid using credit cards. Don't ignore this blinding red flag and eliminate all properties that won't take credit cards! So easy in hindsight.
Be gentle in your replies. We are bruised and exposing our pride so that you may avoid the same mistakes.
IP
