Potential real estate job turned out to be a scam

[cjc1103]

I had a guy text me about taking some drone videos, and interior pictures, of two houses in my town. I'm assuming he got my phone number from my website. After some back and forth by email (he claimed he was "hard of hearing" so he couldn't talk to me on the phone), where his grammar was questionable, I wasn't expecting much, it looked fishy to me, but I gave him a quote for some basic pictures. He then emailed me back and said he was in another city, but a caretaker had the keys to the houses. The catch was the caretaker wouldn't open up the houses for me until he had been paid, and this guy hadn't paid him before he left town, so could I add the caretaker fee to my invoice, and send the money to him?
Seriously, if these dweebs spent 1/10th of their time working at an honest job rather than scamming people, they might be successful. Unbelievable.

 

[BigAl07]

I had a guy text me about taking some drone videos, and interior pictures, of two houses in my town. I'm assuming he got my phone number from my website. After some back and forth by email (he claimed he was "hard of hearing" so he couldn't talk to me on the phone), where his grammar was questionable, I wasn't expecting much, it looked fishy to me, but I gave him a quote for some basic pictures. He then emailed me back and said he was in another city, but a caretaker had the keys to the houses. The catch was the caretaker wouldn't open up the houses for me until he had been paid, and this guy hadn't paid him before he left town, so could I add the caretaker fee to my invoice, and send the money to him?
Seriously, if these dweebs spent 1/10th of their time working at an honest job rather than scamming people, they might be successful. Unbelievable.

That exact same scam contacted me several weeks ago. I realized when he couldn't take a phone call exactly where this was going. So we played with him for a couple of days going back and forth and taking up as much of their time as I could.

Ironically the scammer was trying to get me to shoot a house that am familiar with LOL.

Sadly they only have to "close" a small percentage of their attempts to make BIG $$. I can see how an eager and inexperienced operator would JUMP at that and loss some hard earned $$ in the process.

 

[Kristina Fowler]

I've gotten a handful of these in the last year....

Notice the cc: to himself - but with a different address. All of these seem to include the phrase "get back to me".

 

[BillB]

I've gotten a handful of these in the last year....

Notice the cc: to himself - but with a different address. All of these seem to include the phrase "get back to me".

I've had 5 of these in the past 4 months, one from Eaton. It starts like yours with a do you take credit cards? Then a complex 28 day drone and ground shoot is proposed of a nearby property. I've cut them off before they set the hook. The property owner knows nothing of the request in the one I was able to check on.

 

[prodigal27]

Got the same scam. Homeowner is hard of hearing and they wanted money to pay for the key or something.

 

[Dave Pitman]

I have had a few of these. The first one, before I realized it was the intro to a scam, I replied to the "are you available for aerial photography and do you take credit cards?" with "yes, and I take credit cards thought PayPal." That was enough to discourage them. Scammers don't like going through a service like PayPal.
The ones since then that were similar went to spam folder.