SANDPOINT — A Craigslist scam has recently targeted those looking to rent a house in the Sandpoint area.

Stephanie Rief, association executive with Selkirk Association of Realtors in Sandpoint, said a couple of real estate agents in the area have had their listings poached by scammers who posted the homes on Craigslist.

Rief said as convincing as the fake listings are, some research is done, although the information they need can be found by going to a real estate website that contains the original listing.

"The information that can be found on homes for sale is actually easy enough as it is provided to the consumer as a means of advertisement to sell the home," Rief said in an email to the Daily Bee. "Most who are looking for a rental do not usually look for homes that are listed with a Realtor so they wouldn’t know the home was for sale unless they actually drove by."

Rief sent the Daily Bee a copy of an email she and one of the real estate agents both received after posing as an interested renter. The scammer, who went by the name the Rev. Dr. James B. Harris, emailed back and said he was a volunteer with the Evangelical Council of Financial Accountability and, after being relocated to Texas, would be away for at least five years and wanted to rent the home to "whomever would take good care of it."

The scammer's email reiterated a few times that if there was a sign in the yard or a listing on another website, they should not call any of the numbers. The reason for this, the scammer wrote, is that he was originally planning to sell the house through an agent, but decided not to, so the agent may still have listings or signs up. The other listings he was referring to were, of course, the real listings.

According to the Better Business Bureau, Craigslist rental scams are common. New York University researchers reviewed more than two million rental listings and found 29,000 fake listings in 20 major cities across the United States. The BBB reports that of those listings, three main types of rental scams were prevalent.

Many of the fake listings instructed a would-be tenant to purchase a credit report. The scammer gets a commission from the credit reporting site, even though there is no property for rent. Another scheme is similar to the one seen by real estate agents in the Sandpoint area where the scammer duplicates rental listings from other sites and posts them on Craigslist at a lower price. In those cases, prospective renters are often asked to pay a deposit through wire transfer. Another scam is "realtor service" companies asking targets to pay fees to view listings of pre-forclosure rentals or rent-to-own properties.