Agents, landlords and tenants warned over ‘latest rental fraud’
Criminals who target renters going through referencing process are newest kind of sophisticated fraudster to emerge from the internet.
Letting agents have been warned to be on the watch out for a new king of rental fraud following a national newspaper investigation.
This follows the case of a teacher in London who, after her partner moved out of their rented accommodation, was asked by her letting agency to go through referencing as the original tenancy had been in his name.
She then received a request via email to complete referencing appears to have been phished by a fraudster who sent through a fake referencing request at the right time.
The woman handed over her passport details and other personal information, the Observer newspaper reports.
This was then used to take control of her 02 phone and ultimately her bank account, from which some £3,500 was stolen although, after exhaustive conversations with Barclays’ fraud team, this was returned.
Referencing caution
Tenants are now being warned to be careful when undergoing referencing via ‘online checks’ and to be wary when their phone inexplicably lose service, as happened in this case, while landlords and agents need to be aware fraudsters are targeting the thousands of tenants who go through referencing every week.
The case has spurred the UK’s biggest digital identity provider, Yoti, to urge the Government to make the use of ‘re-useable, certified ID’ check systems to prevent this kind of fraud by creating a common platform that banks, phone companies and referencing firms can use to verify someone’s identity.
In layman’s terms, these are smartphone apps that require those signing up to prove their identity once through a vigorous document check system, and then enables other organisations like referencing firms or pubs to check a person’s identity without having to do it all again.
This, companies like Yoti argue, would have stopped this latest reported rental fraud.
Robin Tombs (pictured), Yoti’s CEO, says he predicts a shift in five years when the UK Government, or the UK’s financial and telecoms regulators, will decide “key financial and telecoms businesses need to change”.
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