Scottish man forced to return home following elaborate Dublin rental scam

A Scottish man living in Dublin was left with no choice but to return home after being scammed out of almost €2,000 in a crafty accommodation ploy.

The accommodation posting which advertised a room in a two-bedroom house in Smithfield, Dublin was posted on Daft.ie and was posted for a ‘not outrageous, reasonable enough’ price.

The ploy saw a male ‘landlord’ and female ‘tenant’ collaborating to scam people in need of accommodation out of €1,750 for a house that they appeared to have only rented for a short period of time.

Brian and Ciarán coincidentally met each other at the Garda station when they both reported that they had been scammed by the con artists.

Speaking to Joe Duffy on RTÉ Radio 1’s Liveline, Brian said he had been searching for accommodation for around six months and nearly two weeks ago, he came across the residence in Smithfield.

Brian went to view the house, and met with the tenant who he was led to believe would have been his housemate.

The apartment was ‘lived in’ with the tenant having just cooked dinner. She appeared genuine, and was believable in the conversation they had, with Brian keen to make a good impression.

‘As I was leaving, this person told me that I was the tenth person to view it that day and there was another guy on the way in as I was leaving,’ he told Joe.

Brian made contact with the landlord to say he was interested in the room and the landlord responded confirming he could move in. €1,750 was sent via bank transfer. Brian also received a tenancy agreement and a supposed registration for underground parking with everything still appearing believable.

The mental health nurse detailed how he had been ‘back and forth’ with the tenant on WhatsApp trying to arrange when to collect the house keys, only for the ‘tenant’ to suddenly stop responding.

Before long, Brian noted ‘it became very clear that I’d been scammed.’

Brian and his girlfriend went to the Garda station to report the scam where they coincidentally met Ciaran who they overheard making a report fitting the exact same details as Brian’s situation.

Brian noted that his heart ‘sank’ when he heard Ciaran describe the same details he had to the Garda.

Ciaran had returned to the house to find that someone was renting it, with Brian hypothesizing that the alleged landlord and alleged tenant had rented the accommodation for a week or so for the ploy.

Coming onto Liveline, Ciaran recalled viewing the house on Sunday afternoon, with the tenant appearing very ‘genuine’ and as if she had just been chilling out and watching TV. Ciaran said there was ‘definitely quite a few people caught’ as there had been others viewing the room before and after his time slot.

Similarly, Ciaran was told he got the room and when he sent the money, responses stopped.

‘It left me having to move back home to Scotland,’ he told Joe, ‘I had to give up my job and stuff like that. It wasn’t feasible anymore after losing that amount of money. With the last of the money I had, I got a flight home.

Brian noted that Daft’s advice was to report the scam to Gardaí and not contact the scam artist anymore. After a couple of days, the accommodation posting had a note to say ‘fraudulent activity’ was detected, and told Brian they would ‘follow it up’ when and if Gardaí contacted them.