Sunday 21 February 2010

More holiday home rental scams in February 2010


On Saturday 20th February in the early afternoon, over 100 jmlvillas.com property owners received an email enquiry from an applicant called "Frederick" with a Yahoo.co.uk email address.

The enquiries were sent to owners of self catering holiday homes in locations all over France, plus some in Italy and Spain.

Fortunately we are able to receive copy emails that are sent via a response box and have warned the various advertisers that this was most likely not genuine.

The email said "Hello, I need to make a reservation at your place for 2 persons coming to stay in your region for 4 weeks, starting from 20th March to 20th of April 2010. I will need to know your rates per / night for the 2 guests and i will need you to tabulate and let me know the total run-down cost for this 4 weeks period with tax and discounts in Euro currency, so we can arrange for payment.If you do not have availability at the time we request, please let me know when you preferably have availability to accommodate 1 Adults. I will be very grateful if you can get back to me as soon as possible. Thanks"

We replied "We believe this is not a genuine enquiry, we believe it to be a scam rental. You are targeting owners all over France,Italy and other countries. So far today have sent out over 100 of these useless enquiries. Please do not do this anymore. We are considering reporting you to the authorities at Yahoo.co.uk Thanks"

We copied the reply back to the owners and received some thank you emails from advertisers thanking us for bringing it to their attention.

This problem has been going on since 2004 and we have created several pages for owners of self catering holiday homes pn the euro-rentavilla.com website - http://www.euro-rentavilla.com/rental_scams_in_holiday_home_lettings.htm Do take great care if you have a holiday home that you are advertising as people have lost money to these fraudsters.

1 comment:

Nick said...

Well, this is very interesting indeed. Would love to read a little more of this. Good post. Thanks for the heads-up.
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