Coronavirus infection rates are continuing to fall across all ten boroughs of Greater Manchester.
06.02.2022 - 20:20 / manchestereveningnews.co.uk
Scammers are targeting people looking for a place to live in Greater Manchester with fake listings.
The frauds play on the region's housing shortage to try and con would-be tenants out of hundreds of pounds at a time.
The Manchester Evening News has discovered that fake ads are being place on Facebook Marketplace for homes to let.
The posters ask people to contact them by WhatsApp - the encrypted messaging service which is supposed to be more secure than other forms of messaging - to enquire about the properties.
But when asked about viewing the property, the scammers insist cash must be handed over first, for what they claim is a 'refundable deposit'.
Here, the M.E.N's Stephen Topping looks at what the problem means for househunters and agents - reveals what happened when he approached an online scammer, and finds out what Facebook is doing about the problem.
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Having seen a post about the scam affecting someone in Droylsden, Tameside, I searched Facebook Marketplace for myself to look for other suspicious adverts.
I searched for properties to rent within 5km of Manchester and trawled through the list of houses, apartments and flat shares that came back.
Many adverts looked legitimate - such as city dwellers searching for new housemates to take on a room, or tenants looking for someone to take over their tenancy - at prices you would expect to see in Manchester.
But I found a number of adverts which didn't quite look right.
I looked out for two warning signs in particular - posters who gave a number asking to be contacted on WhatsApp, and properties which were listed by established letting agents
Coronavirus infection rates are continuing to fall across all ten boroughs of Greater Manchester.
Coronavirus infection rates across Greater Manchester remain far lower than the national average.
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