December 13, 2010

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Property Portal Phone Scammer Alert



Although they try their best to fight it, property portals – like most businesses – are not immune from the craftiness of Internet scammers.

It appears that some scammers have estate agents as their targets. They are posing as potential buyers and requesting a call back from agents to an international “premium” rate number, via enquiries from property portals.

Scams of this nature, involving unwitting victims calling premium numbers as a matter of urgency, are well documented.

The latest in these attempts was brought to our attention by kyero.com, a niche Spanish property portal serving overseas buyers. kyero.com’s Managing Director, Martin Dell, told propertyadguru.com that a number of suspicious enquiries were made this week to estate agents advertising on kyero.com with a telephone number starting with 0067 0330 XXXX.

“We’ve advised advertisers not to call this number and be very wary about calling telephone numbers to international destinations they are not familiar with,” says Martin.

kyero.com acted quickly to prevent the problem happening again, and say they deleted the suspect enquiries from kyero.com, reported the abuse to the Internet provider and banned the offending email address from accessing kyero.com in the future.

Property scams are nothing new – but they don’t usually target the agent, via property portal leads.

propertyadguru.com advises agents to exercise caution when returning calls – if you’re suspicious of a number, particularly if it’s from overseas, or you don’t recognise the area code, do some research online before you call it or call the phone company or portal and ask a few questions.

[image: flickr/Alexander O'Neill]

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