By Deborah Acosta and Rebecca Picciotto of The WSJ. Excerpts:
"Social media is spreading the word that Atlanta is flush with empty high-end units. Influencers on TikTok say renters can boost their chances of getting approved by fudging financial information on their applications.
Some promoters charge hundreds of dollars for fake rental-application packages, which they say include doctored financial documents, fake social-security numbers and false employment letters.
Greystar, the country’s largest apartment landlord, said that up to half of its rental applications are fraudulent in some Atlanta buildings. Other landlords are also noticing a sharp rise in Atlanta applicants falsifying income or other personal information."
"Nationally, nearly three-quarters of apartment owners reported an average 40% increase in rental-application and -payment fraud last year compared with 2023"
"A combination of factors led to this surge, starting with technology. Advanced photoshopping and the advent of generative artificial intelligence have enabled most anyone with a laptop to fake a pay stub or forge an employment letter."
"One TikTok influencer markets a $1,250 housing and apartment package that includes a nine-digit number called a Credit Profile Number attached to a near-perfect credit score."
"Forging documents for an apartment application is also considered fraud, but landlords rarely pursue legal action. It is difficult to collect legal damages from someone who is unable to pay their rent in the first place. They are more focused on evicting the tenant and finding a replacement."
"While some scammers evade detection by staying current on their rent, many stop paying as soon as they secure their units."
"Applications from fraudsters artificially boost prices by convincing landlords that demand for the more-expensive units is greater than it actually is. Tenants who get in using misinformation often engage in other criminal behavior, neighboring residents say. Those who are caught and evicted are more likely to trash their apartment units on the way out."
"As new rental housing came online, the federal government’s economic-relief checks during the pandemic brought sudden windfalls to families. That allowed some to rent these new luxury units even if the price was above their means. Severe court backlogs made it difficult for landlords to evict."
"Landlords, eager to fill their empty units, are offering an initial period of free rent to attract tenants. But that means it may take months before a landlord becomes aware that a fraudulent renter has no plans to pay."
"most landlords rely on fraud-detection software, which has helped mitigate the issue in Atlanta. But these services have to constantly adapt as fraudsters find ways to circumvent them"
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Rent a White Guy: Confessions of a fake businessman from Beijing (2010) (by Mitch Moxley in The Atlantic Monthly, excerpts below)
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Excerpts from "Rent a White Guy"
"Not long ago I was offered work as a quality-control expert with an American company in China I’d never heard of. No experience necessary—which was good, because I had none. I’d be paid $1,000 for a week, put up in a fancy hotel, and wined and dined in Dongying, an industrial city in Shandong province I’d also never heard of. The only requirements were a fair complexion and a suit.
“I call these things ‘White Guy in a Tie’ events,” a Canadian friend of a friend named Jake told me during the recruitment pitch he gave me in Beijing, where I live. “Basically, you put on a suit, shake some hands, and make some money. We’ll be in ‘quality control,’ but nobody’s gonna be doing any quality control. You in?”
I was.
And so I became a fake businessman in China, an often lucrative gig for underworked expatriates here. One friend, an American who works in film, was paid to represent a Canadian company and give a speech espousing a low-carbon future. Another was flown to Shanghai to act as a seasonal-gifts buyer. Recruiting fake businessmen is one way to create the image—particularly, the image of connection—that Chinese companies crave. My Chinese-language tutor, at first aghast about how much we were getting paid, put it this way: “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”
Six of us met at the Beijing airport, where Jake briefed us on the details. We were supposedly representing a California-based company that was building a facility in Dongying. Our responsibilities would include making daily trips to the construction site, attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and hobnobbing. During the ceremony, one of us would have to give a speech as the company’s director. That duty fell to my friend Ernie, who, in his late 30s, was the oldest of our group. His business cards had already been made."
"For the next few days, we sat in the office swatting flies and reading magazines, purportedly high-level employees of a U.S. company that, I later discovered, didn’t really exist."
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