Family moves into rental, finds out ‘landlord’ doesn’t actually own it. Thanks to smart locks

Imagine moving hundreds of miles away to a new rental home, packing up your whole life …  the kids, the pets. Signing a lease, paying a deposit, unpacking everything, and setting up your new home. And then finding out that you are trespassing, and you must leave in three days. That sounds unbelievable, and the first time I heard about it all I could think was, how could this possibly happen?

It’s real.  All thanks to Smart Locks, and a really strange implementation of them.

I like to say that technology often creates almost as many problems as it solves. Well, sometimes it does more harm than good.

Phillip Rumple moved his family from Las Vegas to Denver recently.  A savvy Web user, he used great care when he picked a potential home rental off the Internet. He actually flew to Denver for a day to inspect the home himself.  He met a real estate agent; she let him in. When everything checked out, he signed a lease, sent the deposit, rented a U-haul, drove nearly 1,000 miles, and pulled into the Denver driveway a few weeks later. He moved the family into the home on schedule.

Strange knocks on the door soon followed; multiple people showed up claiming “they” had rented the home. Then three days later, the home’s owner told him he was trespassing, and he had to leave immediately.

Turns out the realtor was an impersonator; the ad was fake. The home Rumple moved into is really owned by Invitation Homes Inc., a nationwide single-family home rental firm. Invitation Homes, like many landlords, offers “self-guided” tours of its rentals. Would-be renters get a smart lock code so they can check out a home on their own.  Sure, that’s better than having to arrange a time to meet.  But now, criminals have figured out they can use this feature to lure home seekers into elaborate scams.

The entire story is wacky, and I cover it in much more detail at this week’s The Perfect Scam podcast.  I hope you’ll listen. But to be clear, this is not some odd one-off incident. Invitation Homes sent us this statement.

“We are always frustrated to discover that one of our homes has been used for these types of scams which can have a devastating effect on the victims. Whenever we discover that someone is living in one of our homes as a result of a scam, we offer the opportunity for that person to apply legally for the home directly with us.”

The firm also said it takes multiple precautions to keep criminals from using their homes for scams. With regard to smart locks, the firm said, “It has become common practice in multifamily and single-family rentals to utilize a smart lock system to show homes.”

Smart locks are pretty neat; they basically enable the entire Airbnb / homeshare ecosystem, for example. Naturally, entrance codes must expire on a timely basis for that to work.  Imagine if homeshare owners … or in this case, rental owners…were routinely careless with smart lock codes?

What happened to Rumple’s family is astonishing, but notably, it would have been impossible without the use of high-tech tools.  The road to tech utopia is full of potholes…and much worse.

Given what we learned from the recent Crowdstrike incident, we all need to keep in mind that our seemingly magical high-tech world is more fragile than we realize; it’s full of vulnerabilities that can have cascading, devastating impacts.  This doesn’t mean we should stop progress, of course. But we do need to be honest about what’s an actual innovation vs what’s just cost cutting, or downright corner cutting, dressed up as tech.  Recently, CVS announced a plan turn over customer service to an artificial intelligence agent.  Anyone who’s ever had trouble with a prescription can guess how well that might go. About as well as moving into a home that a “landlord” doesn’t really own.

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About Bob Sullivan 1662 Articles
BOB SULLIVAN is a veteran journalist and the author of four books, including the 2008 New York Times Best-Seller, Gotcha Capitalism, and the 2010 New York Times Best Seller, Stop Getting Ripped Off! His latest, The Plateau Effect, was published in 2013, and as a paperback, called Getting Unstuck in 2014. He has won the Society of Professional Journalists prestigious Public Service award, a Peabody award, and The Consumer Federation of America Betty Furness award, and been given Consumer Action’s Consumer Excellence Award.

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