How to avoid the Vacation Rental Scam. Advice from the pros.

Scammers are smart, crafty, and innovative. I have often thought that if they put as much thought and effort into a legitimate enterprise as they do into scamming people, they would find honest success.

For guests: how to spot a fake or misrepresented listing

• Talk to the host before you pay. Ask about things you can check in the photos or on Google Maps - how many the dining table seats, how many burners the stove has. A real owner answers without hesitating. Someone who will only deal by text or email, or who keeps putting the call off, is worth walking away from.

• Pay through the listing, and only through the listing. The checkout on the listing page runs on the payment processor the host has connected. Do not pay through a link a host sends you by email or text, and never by wire, gift card or crypto. Houfy is not in the payment flow and cannot refund or reverse a payment - your card issuer or the payment processor is your route to dispute one, so use a method that gives you that route. If a host asks you to pay outside the listing, stop and use the Report option on the page.

• Check the badge, then check anyway. Hosts can verify their identity on Houfy with a government-issued ID and a utility bill, deed or insurance statement, and verified listings carry a badge - but look for it on the listing in front of you, and do these checks either way. Search the photos by image (right-click a picture and search for it) to see whether the same property appears elsewhere under a different name or phone number. If it does, tell every site it appears on; a real owner will get the fakes removed.

• Get the address and the terms in writing before you finalise. A rental agreement naming the address or unit number, the dates, the price and what is included is what protects you if you arrive at a different property than the one advertised. If the listing does not specify the unit, ask before you book. An honest owner whose property becomes unavailable contacts you straight away and offers a refund or an upgrade.

• A price far below the market is the warning, not the win. Check what comparable properties cost for those dates. Guests have travelled across the country to a home that was never available, on the strength of a price five times under the going rate, and the police could not help them recover it.

For hosts: the scam that targets you

The version aimed at hosts arrives as an enquiry. A "guest" wants to pay by cheque or bank transfer - often for more than the total, asking you to refund the difference - or moves the conversation to private email or text within a message or two. The cheque bounces after you have sent the refund, or the transfer never existed.

• Never accept or deposit a cheque for a booking, and never send bank details or a deposit address. Take payment only through the processor connected to your listing - Stripe, Square or PayPal - so the money moves inside a system that can trace it.

• Treat a guest moving the conversation off Houfy as the signal. A real guest has no reason to insist on private email before booking. Swapping email addresses for check-in details once the booking is paid is normal; pushing for it before payment is not.

• Report the member to Houfy the same day. In the message, click the More icon and choose Mark as Spam - that acts on the one message. Then open the sender’s profile and use Report this profile, or write to info@houfy.com with the link to the enquiry, so we can act on the account. Hosts do not have a block control on Houfy; account-level action is ours to take, and we take it faster when you send us the link.

• Already deposited a cheque? Call your bank before you send any refund. A cheque can be reversed days after it appears to clear, and Houfy is not in the payment flow, so we cannot recover money sent from your own account.

• Nobody at Houfy will ever ask you to pay or refund outside your connected processor. A message that does is not from us.

If you are looking for a great vacation rental, for the best price, use Houfy. There are no booking service fees on most homes (a home run through a property management system carries an API connection fee of up to 5%, always itemised before you pay), and you have direct communication with your host.