Friends left 'in tears' over £8k rental scam

Two childhood friends say they were left in tears after handing over £8,000 for a north London rental flat that turned out to be a short-term holiday let.

Sarah and Amy - not their real names – signed a rental agreement for a flat in Chapel Market, Islington after an in-person viewing but arrived on the day they were supposed to move in to find they had actually been shown a holiday let.

The pair, from Surrey and Hampshire, are among roughly 20 people to have been scammed using the same property, the BBC understands.

Sarah, 29, said: "I went to the property with my mum with all of my belongings – I knocked on the door and no one came."

She added: "I had never heard of this sort of thing happening, I didn't understand how it could happen."

Amy said: "We were so excited to live together. We had both packed up our lives to move in, we were fortunate to have family homes to move back into."

Sarah and Amy said they had been looking to move to London together for "a little while" in March 2025 when they found the property listed for a good price.

The pair were directed to a letting agent and booked an in-person viewing, which Sarah attended with Amy on a video call.

In order to secure the property, they later offered to pay a six-week deposit and three months of rent upfront, totalling about £8,000.

When they arrived to pick up the keys, Sarah said she waited for an hour before a cleaner opened the door to tell them the flat was, in fact, a holiday let.

The pair are in touch with other people who claim they handed over money for the same property, and have called for others to be aware of the "sophisticated fraud".

Sarah and Amy both said the people they spoke to in person and interacted with over the phone appeared legitimate, and that the process they went through "mirrored exactly what a tenancy process looks like".

They said they later found that the people who had scammed them had stolen the identity of both the landlord of the property and a letting agency in order to carry out the scheme.

Alison Farrar, lead officer for property and lettings for the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, said: "If a scammer decides to rent a property for a week and pack in appointments, in theory they could be seeing a person an hour.

"They will do everything they should be doing and it's really hard to tell whether you are being scammed or not.

"Our advice is to take a step back - a genuine landlord or agent will not put pressure on you. So if they are, ask even if it isn't a scam why they are doing it."

Later this year, landlords will also have to be registered to a database, which would allow renters to check that homes are registered to who they have been told they are registered to.

After reporting the incident to Action Fraud, now Report Fraud, Sarah and Amy were eventually able to receive the vast majority of their money back, except for a small admin fee.

A spokesperson for Report Fraud said it had received the report and passed the investigation on to the Metropolitan Police.

A force spokesperson said it had received "multiple reports" of alleged rental fraud between January and July 2025.

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