Lazy Man and Money

A Brilliant Craig’s List Scam (Beware of DS Properties)

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My wife and I are doing a little apartment shopping. Our place is fine enough, but we thought we might want to add little space… plus the rents have gone down a bit in Silicon Valley and we feel we can get more for our money. I particularly like Craig’s List for this purpose because we can cyber-stalk a few places to get an idea of the market.

An interesting thing happened last Saturday night when I did my Craig’s List search. A 2600 square foot, 4 bedroom house in Redwood City came up at $1700. This is in contrast to the two bedroom, 1100 sq. ft. place we have now at $2075 a month. The advertisement was simply too good to be true. Nonetheless, I figure it can’t hurt to ask. Here’s the response I got:

Thank you for contacting us about the property. The property is still available as of now. We are trying to find a tenant for this property ASAP, first-come-first-serve basis. Move-in date is negotiable.

We are a group of real estate investors. We have many rental properties available with great lease term. In order to handle large amount of inquiries as quickly as possible, we ask you to follow our process.

We only deal with possible tenants who can provide us with their own credit report. We have learned over the years that by doing some pre-screening up front we save great deal of time. This is how we can offer you lower than market rent and still be able to profit. We think this is a win-win for all parties involved. You will not be disqualified as long as you don’t have any major real estate related problem on your credit report.

If you already have a recent report we may be able accept that, as long as it contains the information that we are looking for. It has to be taken within the last 30 days (no exception there) from a reputable company. Otherwise please go to our investor tools page at http://www.dsproperties.info/4694.html and follow the credit report link there. We prefer their report and it will process fastest with us. They have free trial.

Contact us back only after you obtained the actual report. Be sure to include the ID below in your follow-ups. Then we’ll have the investor in charge of this property contact you. You are to bring the credit report and the rental application (which is also on the investor tools page) directly to the investor at the time of showing. Do not email or mail sensitive information for privacy/security reason.

Can you spot the scam? If you are a personal finance blogger, I bet you can. If you go to the link they provide, they are an affiliate for FreeCreditReport.com. That means that they earn a few bucks from everyone they can convince to sign up and join the service. How can FreeCreditReport.com offer this? In order to get your “free” credit report, you have to agree to sign up for some services at a monthly fee. If you are on top of things, you can cancel the services right away… but there’s enough people who let it slip to make it profitable. It’s a little bit like rebate breakage in that way.

I wrote them back with my Credit Karma score (which really is free – no strings attached). Funny, but they didn’t respond to me. It’s probably because the deal that was too good to be true actually was.

Credit Karma’s Credit Simulator (and Other Credit Tools)

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Last April, I went to Finovate Startup in San Francisco. I was introduced to around 40 companies at the time, and I met a number of their founders personally. One of them was Credit Karma. You may remember that in the past, I told you how you can get, free credit scores from them. It’s important to realize that a credit score is different from a credit report (which are typically free, one per year, from AnnualCreditReport.com.

I got a little off-track with the credit score explanation.  I meant to report that Credit Karma won Best in Show at Finovate this year. What did they do to earn those honors? I’ll let you know, but first I wanted to mention a couple of other things that I noticed they were up to:

  • Recommended Credit Cards – They have a section of credit cards that is different than your usual credit card page. These credit cards seem personalized. Since they know my credit is excellent, they show me the cards in the excellent rating. They even have ratings based on what other Credit Karma vote, the approval rate of applications, and what Credit Karma users are actually signing up for.
  • Improved Credit Karma Blog – As a blogger, I tend to notice blogs – even corporate ones. This one has a lot of information about improving your credit as well as some timely credit news. My favorite is what is a good credit score. That’s exactly what you’d expect from a credit-focused company trying to transition from start-up to market leader.
  • Credit Simulator – This is the tool that carried Credit Karma to Finovate’s Best in Show award. Let’s pretend you signed up for Credit Karma when I reviewed them last time. Credit Karma gave you a score of 680. It’s not great, but you know you could do better. If you only knew what you could do to help it out. Enter the Credit Simulator. This tool allows you to see how your credit would change in a number of scenarios. Some of them include, adding a new loan, adding a credit inquiry, closing your oldest credit card, allow a monthly account become 30 days overdue, etc. This tool finally gives you some insight to how your credit score is affected. Granted, it’s not a FICO score, it’s a reason estimation.

Here’s one feature to look for in the future. My Credit Karma score dropped, and I didn’t know why. I figured that since Credit Karma is constructing my score from my report, they could tell me what I did to deserve the drop. Unfortunately, they couldn’t tell me what had changed in my account. After talking with the CEO, I have confidence this may be something you’d see in the future from Credit Karma.

Finovate Demos – Part 4

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In case you missed parts one, two, and three, I’m sharing my notes after seeing 40 start-up financial companies present their companies. Today, I’m rounding up the last of the four companies.

BlingNation – You’d think this name would have something to do about pushing luxury branding, but that’s not the case. It’s yet another mobile payment. It looked like they weren’t a consumer product, but instead plan to sell their product for private branding.

Zopa – Won the Best of Show, which I think shocked many. This is not a P2P company in the US like the UK version (and they went out of their way to stress that). Zopa evaluates each country’s culture and regulations to determine the business opportunity present. The most interesting about this demo is that you can actually take a loan and pay back negative interest – if you have help from others buying a CD. Expect to read more of this from me in the next week or two.

TrustedID – I went to the restroom during this presentation, but for completeness talked to them after their demo. They prevent identity theft so they’d be in the same space as Lifelock. Looking over the benefits of their $100/year plan, I imagine one could approximate the value by getting free annual credit reports, free services like CreditKarma, and freezing your credit report when you don’t need it (free in some states, $15 in others).

BusinessLogic – MoneyPools – Incredible graphs, they just need Tom Cruise waving his hands to control them and you’d have Minority Report. Overall the product helps you view your asset allocation in extensive detail. Once your data is loaded in, you can do things like look at your retirement accounts in aggregate and then “zoom in” on sector and style analysis.

Aradiom – Another that I’d have to put in the “best demos” category, but completely irrelevant for consumers. They create a platform that makes it easy for banks to build mobile banking applications. Sounds dry, but they built an application there in the five minute demo. You don’t need to be a programmer, so it reminded me a lot of Visual Basic. You add pre-defined high-level components like a login screen and you are up and running.

CheckingFinder – This was a standout of the show and when they launch in a month, I’ll likely be in great support of them. In short, it’s a search engine for high-interest yielding checking accounts. They showed some banks that were willing to pay you 5% or more on your checking account if you meet a few requirements (such as make 12 debit transactions a month). I don’t know about you, but that’s getting into Scarlett Johansson attractive territory.

Sparkroom – I didn’t fully understand their product. It seemed to help people analyze how their lead generation campaign is performing. This is something that’s apparently useful for those in the mortgage business.

TradeKing – They seem a lot like Zecco except that you pay commissions. They focus on the community aspect as well and have been around longer. In the end, it’s about stock trading and telling others about it.

ClairMail – Another mobile banking company. At this point in the day, I was pretty much asleep. I didn’t really see anything exciting for consumers here.

Vestopia – Allows you to view the transactions of a real industry professional in real time. I think it’s an excellent contrast to the crowd-sourcing that other companies are doing with their community. To be honest, I didn’t have high expectations of this company, but the presentation was decent and I got to speak with the CEO for a few minutes which really galvanized the idea for me.