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Brought to you by Northeast Alabama Regional Medical Center
Thursday, April 5, 2012
The FBI says it's a new twist on an old scam. Cyber hackers are creating an email address using your personal information then posting your home for rent online. This happened to Pat Snow. He recently moved to Austin, TX but wanted to keep his house in Crestwood. Snow thought renting out the home would be a good option, but discovered someone else already had the same idea. "It was someone posing as me on CraigsList trying to rent my house out," said Snow, "Somehow they captured some pictures of the house from another source and found out my legal name from the tax titles or deeds on the property and created an email account with my legal name." Snow emailed the person pretending to be him and got this response along with a picture of the family that supposedly owns the house. "It cracks me up because that's not what I look like," said Snow. Snow contacted Birmingham Police and the FBI in Austin, but there's not much more he can do. "This is a really great scam because they're taking advantage of people who really don't have the ability to get any restitution for what happens to them," said real estate agent Ravinell Wilson. Wilson says you should always inspect a rental property in person before you sign a lease. If the person online won't give you access to the property first, that should be a red flag. Snow says he connected the online IP addresses to Nigeria and California. He's also sending all of his emails with the fake homeowner to the FBI to assist their investigation
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Keywords: Craigslist, scam, Birmingham, rental properties, FBI,
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