Today’s Scam of the day is an update on a Scam of the day from February 15, 2017 when I first told you about the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) getting a temporary restraining order against Credit Bureau Center LLC, Michael Brown, Danny Pierce and Andrew Lloyd as a part of its legal action against them on charges that they operated scams involving phony rental property advertisements and offered “free” credit reports for which they charged monthly amounts to their victims’ credit cards.  Recently, the FTC received a court judgment against Brown and his company Credit Bureau Center LLC ordering them to pay 5.2 million dollars and shutting down the company. In October of 2017, the court had issued judgments against Danny Pierce and Andrew Lloyd in which they were ordered to pay $762,000 to settle the FTC’s claims. 
According to the FTC, the scammers placed Craigslist advertisements for rental properties they were not authorized to represent and in some circumstances even placed advertisements for properties that did not even exist.  When people responded to the ads, the victims were told that before they could see the properties they had to get a free credit report from the defendants’ websites’ myscore.com, creditupdates.com and freecreditnation.com in order to qualify to be considered for renting the properties.  The “free” credit reports, however, were far from free because the fine print in the agreement to obtain the “free” credit report required the victim to enroll in a credit monitoring service with a continuing monthly charge of $29.94.  According to the FTC, the victims never were shown properties even after getting the required credit report and the scammers ignored all communications from their victims after the victims signed up for the credit monitoring service.
TIPS
Advertisements for rental units and vacation rentals that are not owned by the scammers placing the advertisements is a common scam.  It is easy for scammers to get photos and other information about rental units and vacation rentals from legitimate websites and post them to lure victims into sending money to the scammers as a deposit.
A good way to protect yourself from this type of scam is to do a Google or other search engine search with the address of the property to see where it may turn up and who is listed as the owner.  Another good source of information is to go online to the Tax Assessor for the city or town where the property is located and confirm that the name of the property owner matches the name of the person attempting to rent you the property.
In regard to “free” credit reports, you should never have to give a credit card number for a free service although often scammers require this.  You should also carefully read any contract you make.  There rarely is anything fine in fine print.  The victims of this particular scam would have seen that they were signing up for a recurring charge if they carefully read their contract.
Finally, carefully monitor your credit card statements and bank accounts often to discover fraudulent charges as soon as possible.
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