Long Island rental scams exploit desperate search for affordable apartments

Judith Damelio has spent the last year combing apartment listings for a rarity on Long Island: a home for about $1,500 or less. But instead of finding an affordable place to live, Damelio said she spent much of her time scoping out listings that appeared to be either misleading or intentional scams.

Many of the apartments she’s inquired about — all on Facebook Marketplace — appeared to be advertised at sharply reduced prices by people seeking her personal information, application fees or other payments, she said

"I was getting really annoyed that people were trying to take advantage of [me]," said Damelio, of Centereach, adding that she reported a handful of these listings to Meta. "If there's anything [online] that looks too good to be true, it is. Don’t waste your time."

Damelio’s experience illustrates how Long Island’s high rents and limited supply of affordable housing can make renters vulnerable to scams and misleading listings. People searching on tight budgets need to move quickly to land a low-priced listing, housing experts said — and scammers exploit that urgency to extract money or personal information.

Fewer than 20% of Long Island households rent their homes, but most renter households are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing, according to a 2024 report from the state comptroller’s office. Long Island’s high rents make it very difficult to find an apartment below $2,500, let alone Damelio’s budget of around $1,500. The median asking rent in Suffolk County was $2,943 per month as of July 28, according to data from commercial real estate platform CoStar. In Nassau County, it was $3,267 per month.

"The tight housing market definitely makes things much worse," said Ian Wilder, executive director of Bohemia-based nonprofit Long Island Housing Services.

Scammers "don't even have to create a false sense of urgency," he added, "They just have to remind people that, ‘If you don't rent it, I have 10 more people that will take it, so give me the money now.’"

Statewide, 839 New Yorkers lost a collective $15.8 million in 2025 to real estate-related fraud, which includes scams involving investments, homes, rentals and timeshares, according to the FBI.

Locally, federal data shows hundreds of complaints from Nassau and Suffolk counties.

Last year, the Federal Trade Commission received 379 complaints about rental scams in Nassau and Suffolk counties, according to a spokeswoman for the New York Department of State who shared the data from an intergovernmental database of fraud reports. Between Jan. 1 and July 6, the FTC has received about 134 complaints, the spokesperson said.

Nationally, reported losses totaled $275 million in 2025, with older adults losing the most, according to the FBI.

A few Long Islanders have been arrested in the past decade for taking security deposits and then refusing to give renters their keys or posing as a real estate agent to scam potential renters out of thousands of dollars. In New York City, Gothamist reported that an alleged scammer refused to return thousands of dollars in security deposits from at least 10 renters who never got the apartments they hoped to rent.

But locally, rental scams aren’t always specifically tracked. The Suffolk County Police Department does not track rental scams as a separate type of theft, according to a spokesperson for the department. The Nassau County Police Department did not respond to questions about how apartment scams are tracked.

Anatomy of a scam

Damelio has a tight budget. She receives $1,120 in monthly Social Security benefits, according to bank deposits she shared with Newsday. She cleans houses around Long Island to cover her expenses — gas, trips to the doctor and food for her cat, Veronica.

"You can’t find anything unless you want to share a room and live with five other people," Damelio said. "I’m too old for that."

In the past month, Damelio said she spoke with two people with two separate phone numbers claiming to rent the same first floor apartment — inexplicably, with a balcony — for $825 in Riverhead, according to text messages and the Marketplace listing reviewed by Newsday.

One person sent her two links to what they described as background check websites, asking her to input her personal information. Both sites had been set up that month, domain records show, indicating that they could be scams. Consumers should always be suspicious of any newly-created website, said Amir Rahmati, assistant professor of computer science at Stony Brook University.

The other person asked her to pay for an application fee by buying a $75 Apple gift card and sending the card information, according to texts Damelio shared with Newsday. Damelio said she assumed both conversations were blatant attempted scams.

A request to buy gift cards is a common sign of a scam, Rahmati said. So is the amount requested; New York law generally limits the amount a landlord may charge for a credit and background check to $20 per person.

The pressure to pay quickly is not incidental. Experts say urgency is central to how rental scams work.

By putting a prospective renter under pressure, scammers convince them that the opportunity will disappear if they don’t take action right away, Rahmati said. Scammers also can use artificial intelligence tools to automate parts of the operation, including using AI agents to communicate with potential victims, said Rahmati, who studies scams at the Ethos Security & Privacy Lab at Stony Brook University.

Not every suspicious rental encounter is clearly a scam, but renter Michael Herbst said he encountered some of the patterns experts say apartment seekers should watch out for, including requests for payment before seeing a property and charges that differ from the amount advertised.

Herbst, a 42-year-old disability advocate living in Manorville, was searching for an apartment for less than $2,400 after his landlord informed him that his monthly rent would increase from $2,300 to $3,500.

Herbst said he found an East Quogue unit advertised on Facebook Marketplace for around $1,600 per month. He emailed the person who posted the listing, who sent him a link to what the person described as a website where he could pay a $9 fee for a background check, according to emails he shared with Newsday.

Instead, Herbst was charged more than three times the fee he had been told he would pay.

After entering his credit card information, Herbst got a fraud alert from his bank for a $29.98 charge from Swinget LLC, an entity tied to a company that sells sand art, which has been linked to other background check scams on social media, according to the emails and bank alert he shared with Newsday.

Herbst’s bank automatically declined the transaction — saving him the fee. But the interaction left him upset, and more importantly, without an affordable apartment.

"Facebook Marketplace is kind of what Craigslist was," Herbst said. "It’s the wild, wild west. Buyer beware."

A Newsday reporter contacted the email address of the person Herbst corresponded with about the apartment, who used the name Tonya Martin. The reporter received an apparently automated message asking about the reporter’s plans to rent an apartment, including whether she had any pets, her monthly income and the move-in date, but did not respond to Newsday’s questions about Herbst's account, their identity and if they have a real estate license.

No Tonya Martin is listed as a licensed real estate agent in New York, according to Department of State data.

A representative for Swinget did not respond to a request for comment.

Scams on social media

Real estate agents said scams are most common on social media platforms, where people posting listings may not have to verify that the apartment is legitimate.

But scams have also been spotted on other rental platforms. In 2023, New York State Attorney General Letitia James and several other states secured a roughly $36 million judgment from the roommate-finding website Roomster, after suing the platform and its executives for allowing unverified apartment listings and scams to proliferate on the platform, according to the lawsuit and judgment.

Cheryl Messina, an associate real estate broker with Signature Premier Properties, said she has seen fake listings for more than a decade.

"I’ve seen them mirror my listings for half the price on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist," Messina said. "I no longer allow taking videos at showings because that’s stuff that scammers can use."

Meta is aware that rental scams are a problem. The company disabled 63,000 accounts that were allegedly part of a coordinated network of scammers posting fake rental property listings on Facebook that allegedly targeted "vulnerable populations including low-income families and unhoused individuals seeking affordable housing in the United States," according to a report from Meta published in March.

The scam network impersonated landlords and emergency housing providers, and asked victims to give up their personal and financial information that was sold to marketing services, according to the report.

A spokesperson for Meta said the company removes content that exploits or deceives people and prohibits misleading listings. Meta uses AI tools to detect scammers and removed more than 159 million scam ads globally last year, according to a company announcement.

Meta also filters suspicious messages into a spam folder, asks suspicious accounts to undergo additional verification and can display warnings when someone requests payment in advance.

But Rahmati said Meta could do more to prevent scammers from posting listings — such as by going through a special verification process for the alleged poster — and consistently notifying renters about the risk of scams.

Still searching

Herbst told Newsday on Tuesday that he’d finally found an apartment in Upton for $2,400 per month through a friend and hoped to move in the following month.

But Damelio has not been so lucky.

Damelio is still looking for a new home, and working with a real estate agent to find an affordable rental. Her agent, Todd Romano, told Newsday that he’s negotiating with two landlords on possible apartments for Damelio.

"Agents help you avoid those scams," Romano said. "We have spaces that are listed on the multiple listing service. Those listings are bound by certain guidelines. And they are legitimate rentals."

Romano said he hopes to find a landlord who agrees to a price Damelio can afford.

Until then, Damelio said she’s waiting — both for a place to live and for the scammers who targeted her to be held accountable.

"I’m mad, but more importantly, I just want it to end," Damelio said. "I am not the only person."