To help Americans avoid the fate of 5.2 million renters victimized by fake rental listings, Onerent, the largest small-residential rental manager on the West Coast, launched Scamlord.ai to help protect renters from fraud.
“Rental scams are a billion-dollar problem in the U.S. We’re calling the purveyors of these awful scam listings ‘scamlords’ to really highlight the danger of online scams,” said Chuck Hattemer, co-founder and CMO of San Jose, California-based Onerent. “This is the first anti-rental scam tool we’re launching to help educate renters and stop scammers. This is critical given that online scams are surging due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some scammers are claiming they’re a landlord who can’t do a showing because of social distancing. They’ll often ask you to wire money in advance.”
A Scamlord.ai user inputs information collected from a rental listing to verify if the listing is bogus or real. The artificial intelligences tracks patterns in the types of properties targeted by defrauders and the phone numbers they use, specifically VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) numbers which are created on the internet. The AI verifies the details provided and determines the likelihood of a scam. Users then consider this information in deciding their next course of action with recommendations on what they can do.
“We tune our algorithms to follow behavioral patterns of rental scammers. Listing details are fed into a basic machine learning model that identifies the likelihood of fraud,” said Julian Kuan, Onerent’s lead data scientist, and COO. Onerent has leased more 8,000 homes and encountering thousands of fraudulent rental listings over the years.
