SCAM...beware inexperienced investors!
Not that we are super experienced but if we hadn't taken classes this is something we may have fallen for.
Recently we found a house for sale by owner on Zillow. We contacted the seller and received a text back that it was still available for the price of $50k..he just wanted to sell it to pay off his mortgage. We looked up the history of the home and they had purchased the property in 1999 for $200k so it was possible they only owed 50k and just wanted to get rid of it.
The guy's story was that he and his wife had already moved to Virginia and needed to sell the home. They were currently renting it out we should do a drive by and make sure we were really interested before he puts out his tenants. Fair enough. So we drove by and were very interested, the the place looked great so we wanted to get it under contract to show were were serious and we would do our due dilligence after we secured the property and back out if there were any huge issues.
I wrote up a contract including a $100 deposit and sent it to him to sign at the email he provided. The email was the first and last name of the deed holder at yahoo.com. The fact that we couldn't seem to get this guy on the phone was a bit of a red flag but we hadn't put any money down or locked ourselves into anything so we'd proceed with caution. He also had a phone number from Nevada which was odd but in doing research I found that the couple who owned the house got married in Vegas so there was a small Nevada connection.
We waited for the contract to come back signed. Instead he asked when we could provide $1000 check so that he could hold the house for us. We explained that we wouldn't send him money directly because we had no proof this was legit and asked for his lawyer's contact information which he provided. We would put the money in an escrow account and he'd get it when we closed. He said okay but still didn't send the signed contract. A couple hours later he asked about the deposit again like we had never had the previous conversation. Some people are slow so we explained again about the lawyers, escrow, blah, blah.
Still no contract so we were pretty sure something was up (as we were suspicious of the whole time) so we called the number he gave us for his lawyer and no one answered. He then called us and could barely speak english and the connection was terrible. We knew then 100% that it was a scam but decided to mess with him anyway. We asked him for a copy of his drivers license. He sent some picture of a Texas driver's license with the name Chris Osborne, a picture of an older fellow and a birthdate of 1975. He called us a few more times and we told him we knew it was a scam and we were going to report him. He got angry and eventually text'd "Mugu!". We googled it and found this was a Nigerian term for "you fool". So he called himself out.
I called the real deed holders to warn them that someone was trying to sell their home and they were thankful we called. We never sent the money and never would have but there are probably many out there who wouldn't know any better and may have sent whatever amount he asked for that they would never see again.