Hello: I have had 3 inquiries on one property and I believe they are all scams. This is based on a couple of used years of the language, the lack of information in the request and the request for more information from me in the request. Do you have a link where you want these addresses sent so that you can notify other landlords or block the scammers email address? Claudia

Hi Claudia, No we don’t currently have a block list, but it’s a very good idea to have some way of identifying potential scammers.

If you look at your enquiries list you’ll see a link next to each enquiry which says “claim a refund for this enquiry” (or something like that) – if you click it we’ll automatically refund you the credits for that enquiry if you think it’s fraudulent.

It might be a good idea for us to log the senders email addresses for enquiries that people claim refunds on, and if we see more than a couple for one email address we’ll add a little warning sign when we send you then enquiry to let you know that this person has been rejected several times before – this sounds like the best way of dealing with it to me, because I don’t think it’s a good idea to block enquiries completely – there’s always the chance that we may make a mistake. We already have some plans that are quite similar to this.

Bear in mind that it’s quite common for people to send enquiries asking for more information though – especially if your advertisement doesn’t have much descriptive detail, or if there’s no availability information on your advertisement, or if your tariffs don’t specify seasonal pricing, for instance.

Would you mind forwarding me the enquiries so that we can check them out ? My email address is josh@rentability.com

thanks for the feedback – it’s given us a lot of useful ideas.

Well, today we’ve had an example of why we need to implement this stuff soon – several have you may have heard from the suspiciously polite and god-fearing (yet rather grammatically challenged) Dr. Henry today. Dr. Henry turned out to be from Nigeria, rather than British Columbia as he claimed – and it also seems that he was quite indecisive about where he wanted to go on holiday because he sent out hundreds of enquiries.

It’s been interesting for us because it’s validated some of the thoughts we’ve been having about the design of anti-scamming systems. With our current design Dr. Henry would have certainly been identified almost immediately. We still wouldn’t have blocked his enquiries, but you would have got a prominent warning on the enquiry letting you know that it’s almost certainly fraudulent.

This incident has convinced us that we have to prioritise this stuff a bit higher, so expect the first signs of improvements in this area soon.

I thought it might be time to update this topic, since we rolled out the first stage of our planned anti-scammer system a little while ago now. So far it seems to be performing pretty well, though we’ve been through a couple of iterations of fine tuning. Our earliest verion, for instance, only presented the anti-scammer information if you looked at the “enquiries” section of your dashboard, but many people prefer to simply reply to their enquiry notification emails and rarely look at their Rentability dashboard, so we’ve worked on including more information in the notification email, and we now send our follow-up emails if the “scam-probability” status of an enquiry changes.

We’re very pleased with how well the system is working so far, but we’re not going to rest on our laurels – we’ve got quite a few more ideas about how to improve the system even further, so expect it to get even better over the next few months.