The Hunt For Red Flags
In double-checking the veracity of recent prospective resident applications, Stephanie Jackson, Senior Area Vice President of Atlanta-based RAM Partners LLC, looked at the pay stubs attached to one of them and did a double-take.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said to herself. “There were grammatical errors. I Googled the LLC, and there was [one with] a very, very similar name, but in a different area of town. It was a little weird. I thought, ‘This can’t be that one because the names are different, but it is weird that it is so similar.’ I Googled the address and found that it was residential, in a neighborhood.”
Experiences like these have become all too common for those vetting lease applications for rental housing communities. Jackson, who spoke about combating fraud at last year’s Apartmentalize conference and will do so again this year in Philadelphia, says she sees red flags most often around attempts to falsely inflate income through fake pay stubs or checks and the like, and phony credit protection numbers (CPNs) to obscure bad credit.