How do I avoid a rental scam in London?

Last summer, a 20-year-old student named Mide Awosika believed she had secured a home before starting her term at Queen Mary University in London. She and two flatmates put together a £12,000 deposit for a four-bedroom flat in Poplar, east London. On moving day there were no keys. Instead, nine other people were standing at the same door, holding the same expectation, ready to move into the same flat.

The property had been advertised on Zoopla and OpenRent, two of the largest rental platforms in the UK. Awosika and her flatmates viewed it in July, where the agent introduced himself as Derrick Fringe and told them competition was strong and they needed to pay straight away to hold it. They handed over three months' rent in advance, plus holding and security deposits. Days before the August move-in, Fringe told them the existing tenants had refused to leave and bailiffs were on the way, and then he stopped replying.

When Awosika returned to the building the next day, group after group arrived expecting keys to the same property. She set up a WhatsApp group to bring the affected people together. Since then, 23 people have contacted her saying they were targeted the same way, same flat, same agent.

So that this does not happen to you and the risk grows when you are arranging a rental from outside the country, where a viewing is something you trust someone else to do, this is the first piece in an 11-part series on how to verify a London rental before you pay anything. We start here because this case shows something every renter relocating to London needs to understand: the people who lost their money did everything the normal process asks of you. The system failed them, and it can happen again.

What actually happened

The same steps repeated with every group, and reconstructed from the public reporting, the pattern ran like this:

• A real flat was listed on legitimate platforms: Zoopla and OpenRent.
• The renters attended an in-person viewing of the actual property.
• The agent applied time pressure: pay now, others are interested, you have 45 minutes to get to the viewing.
• Money moved by direct bank transfer to a private individual, off-platform.
• Keys never arrived, and contact ended before the move-in date.

The scale tells you how well the model worked. One group of five would-be flatmates transferred £7,200. Two professionals working in Canary Wharf paid £9,460. Another group transferred more than £26,000. Across the people who came forward, the same address kept appearing under different landlord names and different bank details. The flat itself was advertised as managed by an agency calling itself "Propertiesmatter.com", a site that described itself as a leading UK agency with eight branches and 170 staff, yet named only two people online and listed a membership with the industry body Arla Propertymark that Arla had no record of, and the site has since been taken down.

Why it worked

Read the victims' own words and one thing stands out: they did everything a careful renter does. Satchit Warade, one of the Canary Wharf professionals, described being rushed, the agent gave them 45 minutes to reach the viewing. Freazy Warr, part of the group of five, said the pressure of London's rental market left him feeling exposed, because his lease was ending and he was afraid of having nowhere to live. As he put it, students and people without much money get pushed online, where it is harder to know who to trust.

That fear is the engine. London's rental market has genuine scarcity, affordable properties get taken in days, sometimes hours. So when an agent says someone else is interested and you need to decide now, the claim feels true. It matches what every renter has already experienced, so the urgency feels like the market rather than a warning sign, and this is exactly why it works: it borrows credibility from real conditions.

Here is the principle that separates a real rental from a fraudulent one, and it is the rule we return to throughout this series:

A landlord or agent with a real property to let gives you time to verify. Artificial urgency, "pay now", "someone else is interested", "45 minutes to get here", is the main tool of the fraud, the part that makes it work.

A genuine owner is happy to let you confirm who they are, while a fraudster has everything to lose, so the whole script is built to take away your time to check, and when you notice the clock being forced, that is the scam at work.

Three things this case teaches

First, the portal does not verify: A listing on Zoopla or OpenRent or any other portal confirms that someone paid to advertise a property. It confirms nothing about who controls that property or who has the right to let it. OpenRent said that once it got the report, it took down the listing and suspended the account, and it pointed out that paying outside the platform falls outside its protection. A portal is really just a noticeboard with a wide reach, and that reach is exactly what makes it useful to a fraudster.

Second, the viewing does not verify ownership: Every group saw the actual flat in person, and standing inside a property only proves that the property exists, while the person showing you around may still have no legal authority to rent it. In this case the same flat was shown to group after group, each one believing the viewing had settled the question of legitimacy.

Third, the contract gives you no protection when no one has checked that the person signing it has the right to rent the flat: The affected tenants received contracts and were given landlord names, Edward Robinson among them, and others. The BBC traced an email linked to the listed landlord back to the same account used by the agent, and found different landlord names and bank details all pointing to one address.A contract is only as good as the right of the person signing it, so when no one confirms that right, the document is just paper and the deposit is gone.

What ties all three together is one thing nobody checks: independent confirmation that the person collecting your money has the legal right to let the property. The portal leaves it out, the viewing skips over it, the contract takes it for granted, and the urgency is there to stop you from ever asking for it.

That check is exactly what Kinpany provides, and we work only for the tenant, with full independence from landlords and agencies, which is what keeps the verification independent. If you are renting in London from abroad and want independent verification before you pay anything, Kinpany is here to help you with this: kinpany.co.uk

This is the first piece in an 11-part series on how to verify a London rental before you pay anything. Case details drawn from BBC London reporting (Nicky Ford, 9 June 2026). Reported national figures: rental fraud losses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland rose from £7.2m across 4,642 cases in 2021 to £14.5m across 4,178 cases in 2025.