Apartment scams are on the rise as renters turn to social media to try to find housing deals
As if finding an apartment wasn’t difficult enough, real estate scams are on the rise as renters scour social media to try to find new digs.
Concerns over cost of living have become paramount in a turbulent economy, leading to Instagram and TikTok being swamped with videos of what appears to be real estate agents showing off gorgeous apartments for remarkably low monthly rents.
In reality, scammers pose as real estate agents and post actual listings at what seems like a steal. When someone expresses interest, fraudsters ask for an application fee — and then the prospective tenant never hears back from them, NBC News reported.
The scam has become extremely detailed. If interested social media users question fraudsters, they send an altered photo of agents’ real estate license or send victims to fake agency websites, the outlet reported.
And data suggests these real estate scams are on the rise.
In the first five months of 2025, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 130 real estate complaints referencing social media sites and totalling around $600,000 in losses, the bureau told The Independent in a statement. In 2024, the center received over 150 complaints with more than $1.5 million in losses.
The Independent has asked the FBI for more information about the schemes.
Keller Williams NYC, a luxury real estate agency, now has a banner on its website warning against such scams after someone pretended to be one of its agents, according to NBC.
“Scammers posing as real estate agents using current listings to try to steal down payments and security deposits,” the banner reads, noting the law prohibits the firm from “requesting or otherwise requiring payment of a deposit, additional charge, or Good Faith Deposit to reserve, hold or to view an apartment unit.”
The Independent has contacted TikTok and Meta, the parent company of Instagram, about how they are combatting fraudulent accounts.
TikTok “proactively” took down 97 percent of content that violated its impersonation policy in the first quarter of 2025, while Meta uses a combination of automatic and manual techniques to block accounts that violate its rules, the platforms told NBC News.
But some renters are still being stung. A friend sent Jenny Diaz, 28, an Instagram post of a Manhattan apartment for an affordable price. She was interested, so she contacted the account owner, who appeared to be a real estate agent, boasting 27,000 followers.
“It all seemed so legitimate,” she told NBC News. After Diaz sent her personal information, the “agent” then asked her to pay a $350 “refundable application fee” in exchange for an apartment tour. She forked over the money, received a confirmation email but all future messages went unanswered.
“They stopped responding to me and my heart just dropped. I knew it instantly and I couldn’t believe it,” she told the outlet.
Scammers are also impacting real estate agents.
Mike Bussey, founder and CEO of Real NYC Apartments, told NBC that fraudsters have taken his video listings and put fake price tags on them. The company often posts video tours of apartments across the Big Apple on its TikTok and Instagram accounts, which boast 129,000 followers and 48,000 followers respectively.
Bussey recalled one instance in which a video of a $12,000-a-month apartment was reposted on a fake account showing it was listed for $1,700 a month.
The fake posts were so convincing that even Bussey’s mom fell for it.
“My mother had shown me the video and gone, ‘Mike, this is such a good deal, I’ll rent it myself.’ And I was like, ‘Mom, that’s not real.’ And she goes, ‘No, this is your voice. This is you,’” he told NBC News.
Bussey said that he’s reported more than 1,000 of his videos that were reposted on fake social media accounts. This became such a regular occurrence that he even hired someone to help him flag fake accounts. Still, new accounts continue to crop up in what he described as a “whack-a-mole situation.”
