Searching for an affordable and ideally located house to rent can be very stressful. Many spend months searching for a house and with every disappointment comes despair, lowering of expectations and guard and subsequently resulting in one accepting to settle for less.

Some of you might have stumbled upon posters like this one, advertising vacant houses in Nairobi, written in exactly the same handwriting as below.

This guy is a con who preys on unsuspecting desperate Kenyans looking for affordable housing.

Bill* is one such guy who fell prey to one of these posters. Unfortunately for him, he ended up losing KES 18,000 to the above unscrupulous ‘estate agent’. Here’s Bill’s story, a victim of a fake estate agent scam.

Having given three months’ vacating notice to his landlord, Bill was forced to get a new place within 3 months. As it is the case, getting a house can be a very daunting affair, so, as the three months’ time frame quickly drew to a close, Bill was still to get a new place. Like many Kenyans, he had given notice without identifying first where he will move to next.

Avenue Park 2, along Outer Ring Road, was Bill's neighbourhood of choice. With 5 days to the close of the three months' time frame, Bill came across a poster advertising a vacant 1 bedroom house, available at Fedha Estate, which was going for KES 9,000 per month. At the bottom of the poster was the tag “Owner - No Agent”. Fedha Estate wasn't Bill’s first choice but due to its proximity to Avenue Park, affordability, and desperation to find a house within 5 days, Bill blindly called the number on the poster.

On calling, the voice on the other side of the line assured him that indeed it was that of the owner of the advertised house, but at that particular moment he was outside Nairobi on official business as he claimed to be the mayor of Thika Municipality. The person though gave Bill a telephone number of another person who had been delegated the responsibility of managing the vacant house. Bill called the number and agreed with the new person on an ideal time to go view the house.

On the agreed-upon day and time to view the house, Bill was unable to get a hold of the person managing the ‘vacant house’, forcing him to revert to dealing with the ‘owner of the property’. The purported owner claimed that they had found a more serious prospecting tenant who was to make deposit payment in a couple of hours. Desperate and under pressure to urgently get the place, Bill decided to take a risk, one that ended up costing him KES 18,000.

Bill decided to beat the ‘prospective and more serious tenant’ to the race by making an earlier deposit payment. He sent the ‘landlord’ the required amount via M-Pesa, to secure the house, a mistake Bill lives to remember. After sending money, the purported landlord switched off his phone, never to be reached again.

When it was evident that Bill had been robbed, he reported the incident to the Embakasi Police station, who informed him that they had received similar reports from other members of the public who were also victims of such skims. They recorded a statement, but referred him to Safaricom. When Bill contacted Safaricom, the telcom took the con's number and promised to investigate.

Such fake agents have become very tactful. Some are even identifying vacant houses and by using a master key, are able to show you the house, and if you like it, you make the down payments in cash, and then fake keys are given to you. When you are ready to move in, you come to learn that the house that you thought was supposedly yours belongs to someone else.

One thus needs to be careful when dealing with agents. It is easy to call Bill naive for having fallen for such a cheap trick, but these cons play with your minds, and you begin to trust them. They smell desperation from a distance, and then they curve their games around that.

Bill* isn't the real name of our scam victim