Red flags: spotting fake listings before you pay

Rental scams in Spain follow a small number of scripts, repeated with minor variations across every city. Once you’ve seen the pattern, it’s easy to spot — the trouble is most people encounter it exactly once, at the worst possible moment: desperate, far away, and short on time.

The classic script

A flat is listed 20-30% below market rate for its size and area. Photos look professional, sometimes suspiciously so — a reverse image search often turns up the same photos on a different listing, in a different city, under a different name. The “landlord” is conveniently unavailable to show the flat in person: working abroad, dealing with a family emergency, anything that keeps the conversation to WhatsApp and email.

Eventually, they ask for a deposit — sometimes the whole first month, sometimes just a “reservation fee” — before you’ve seen the flat, met the landlord, or signed anything. Once it’s sent, they stop responding.

A real landlord or agency in Spain will show you the flat, or send someone who can, before asking for a single euro.

What to check before you send anything

Never pay before an in-person or verified video viewing. Ask for the landlord’s name and, ideally, the property’s cadastral reference — a legitimate owner won’t hesitate. Be suspicious of any listing where the price is meaningfully below comparable flats nearby; scammers price to attract volume, not to match the market. And treat “I’m currently abroad, we’ll do everything remotely” as a hard stop, not a minor inconvenience.

Where a phone call helps

A short call does more scam-filtering than it gets credit for. Scammers avoid the phone — it’s harder to run the script live than in a scripted WhatsApp exchange, and a real conversation exposes inconsistencies fast: an address the “landlord” can’t quite describe, a viewing that’s always somehow not possible this week. Every listing Marta calls gets this same live check before it’s presented to you as a real option.