"At first, Sicari, the top rental broker at Douglas Elliman, who leads a team of six other agents, assumed the callers were clients. 'Oh, which apartment?' she'd ask. But the addresses they gave her didn't exist, nor did the prices: $950 for a Soho studio, $2,500 for a loftlike two-bed, two-bath in Greenwich Village, a Gramercy one-bedroom in a luxury doorman building for $1,800 a month."
"It became clear that someone was posting ads all over TikTok and Instagram with her listing images and pretending to be her when someone inquired about them. Soon, she was getting four, five, sometimes ten calls a day. 'It's a scam,' she'd tell callers as soon as she could get a word in. Some of them would be embarrassed but relieved: 'I knew it was too good to be true.'"
Melinda Sicari, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman, began receiving persistent late-night calls from people who had sent or were about to send money for apartments that did not exist. Scammers posted fake listings across TikTok and Instagram using Sicari's listing images and invented rents to lure victims into paying deposits or application fees via Zelle and Venmo. Callers sometimes traveled or repeatedly contacted Sicari's office demanding refunds after realizing they had been duped. Scammers avoided using Sicari's name or photo when creating social accounts to evade detection and removal on social platforms.
Read at Curbed
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