“Don’t judge a book by its cover.”
We’ve heard that all our lives.
In fact, we’ve been told not to judge a book by its cover since we were old enough to understand what the idiom actually meant.
Now, not to be the contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian, but don’t you think that there’s a time and place where you do want to judge a book by its cover?
Listen to this…
A client of mine has a true “luxury” condominium in the downtown core, and I used parentheses because just about everything is luxury so long as you’re willing to use the word, but I digress.
The condo is a penthouse unit on the 55th floor of a condo in the entertainment district, and that entire 55th floor is home to only two units. Suffice it to say, this unit offers true “privacy” for those who require it. The unit is 3,500 square feet with a 2,000-square-foot terrace, complete with a hot tub and an awesome outdoor setup. The unit itself has 270-degree views of the city, and you can see clear to Oakville on a good day.
I mention this not because I’m trying to flex, but rather because I want to convey what type of individual wants to rent this unit.
We could typecast the tenant pool into three types:
- Professional athlete or actor.
- High net worth transplant.
- Fraudster.
I could have included a fourth type that read “crypto kid,” but I think that’s a synonym for “fraudster,” isn’t it? 🙂
Earlier this year, we leased the condo to a professional athlete, but an injury forced him out for the season. We then leased it to another professional athlete on a short-term basis, but he too was out for the season! Tough year!
By the time baseball season was drawing to a close, we had to find ourselves a true long-term tenant, preferably one who went to an office every day and not a sports facility.
Once we put the condo back on the market, the usual inquiries started to roll in.
At $18,000 per month for a luxury furnished rental, you can imagine the type of calls I get.
A few days after we listed the condo for lease, I received an offer from an agent who hadn’t shown the property.
That’s always a red flag.
I spoke to the agent and asked him why he submitted an offer for somebody who didn’t view the property, and he said, “My guy doesn’t need to. He’s the type of guy who knows what he wants, when he wants it, and he wants this place, you know?”
Okay.
His offer was for the full $18,000 per month list price, on a 2-year lease, with $36,000 as a deposit.
Nothing in his offer was untoward.
But when I looked at the “supporting documentation,” I immediately groaned.
I just knew the “type,” if you know what I mean?
In his OREA Rental Application under “AUTOMOBILE(S),” he listed two cars:
Rolls-Royce Phantom RWD
Lamborghini Urus SE AWD
Go on.
Tell me that I’m judging a book by its cover.
Sure, guys who can afford to lease a condo for $18,000 per month might be exactly the same guys who would own two cars worth a combined $1,000,000. Or they could lease them. Who knows!
But it’s that “type” of profile that makes me dig deeper, so that’s what I did.
The prospective tenant was, apparently, an online wealth guru.
His online profile showed hundreds of thousands of viewers and subscribers across every social media platform, and he had no shortage of photos of himself posing in front of luxury cars, showing off luxury watches, jewelry, and clothing, and attending various social events.
Now ask me: is my cup half-empty or half-full?
Tell me that I’m painting this individual with a brush that Bob Ross wouldn’t use while creating a 22-minute masterpiece, but I’m only saying that this sort of individual makes me skeptical.
So I dug further!
As part of his “supporting documentation,” he provided bank statements.
These bank statements showed tens of thousands of dollars going into the account every month, as well as tens of thousands of dollars going out of the account as well. Most of the payments leaving the account were to pay VISA, American Express, and Mastercard. Some months saw hundreds of thousands of dollars in transactions.
Again, my cynical side would say that anybody with a computer can create bank statements. He could have shown hundreds of thousands of dollars going into the account, and nothing going out. Heck, he could have shown me falsified statements from any wealth manager showing millions of dollars in assets!
I called the agent and asked, “What’s with all the money going in and out of the bank account?”
He said, “My guy is flush with cash. Money in, money out. That’s how it goes, you know?”
That was a red flag if I’ve ever seen one. Well, I mean, it’s a red flag when you’re a jaded 46-year-old real estate broker with twenty-two years in the business. But when you’re a 23-year-old who’s “job” is online influencing and day-trading, then it’s probably the coolest thing you’ve ever heard.
I asked, “Where’s his income coming from?”
The agent said, “He’s self-employed. He makes money through his company.”
I asked, “What does his company do?”
The agent replied, “He’s into everything, bro. He’s big on social, he’s got a huge following, he does events.”
I said, “The inflows to the bank account show money being paid from a restaurant. What’s that about?”
The agent hummed and hawed and said, “That’s probably one of his clients.”
I moved on and asked, “Where’s his credit check and identification?”
The agent said, “Oh man, we don’t do credit checks. You know, every time you run a credit check on somebody, it dings their credit rating? That’s why we’re just completely up front, bro. Like, giving you all our bank statements and everything. And you can check him out on social; he’s boss.”
He wasn’t wrong. Er, I mean, about credit checks potentially affecting your credit rating. As for his client “being boss,” I wasn’t sold.
The agent kept saying, “Any doubts, bro, check him out on social. He’s all there, bro.”
Ah, yes, social.
Short for “social media,” except in this case, social media isn’t a thing but rather a place.
Social.
It’s like a world unto itself where you can be anybody, do anything, or see just about anything either.
On social, I found somebody who looked to be doing everything but working. And while I recognize that “social media influencer” is, rather unfortunately, an occupation, I still wanted to know how this prospective tenant was making his money.
His Instagram account only opened two years ago, which was a red flag, in my opinion. Any 25-year-old with a social media account would have opened it a decade ago, and while there’s probably a reason why somebody would start a new account, this simply added to my list of questions.
On his OREA Rental Application, he listed a home in Mississauga as his current primary residence and marked it as “owned.”
I asked the agent, after he stopped talking about social, whether the tenant did, in fact, own the house.
He confirmed that the tenant did.
But when I looked up the property in Land Registry, it was under somebody else’s name.
I called the agent back and asked about the discrepancy, and he hummed a bit more and then said, “I’ll be honest, bro, I think that’s a mistake in the system. I know he owns this house. He bought it for his parents. So it could be in their names.”
But the house was purchased in 2004.
The prospective tenant was in diapers.
The agent said, “I’m not sure, but I can look into that for you.”
I asked him again about a credit check, telling him, “I would never proceed with any tenant without a credit check,” and adding, “It’s standard to provide a credit check with every offer to lease,” but at this point, I just expected another excuse from the agent.
“Yeah man, I know, I know. It’s just that, my client is working on some major projects, you know? He’s got like big money backing him and the last thing he needs is to mess with his credit rating, because his investors want to see a guy that’s all that, you know?”
I felt like I was talking to the kid from the movie We Are The Millers.
Have you seen the movie?
Remember Scotty P. ?
This should jog your memory:
No Ragrets.
Nope. Not even one.
Some of you are laughing along with me, and others are thinking, “David, aren’t you a functioning human adult??”
In any event, I felt as though Scotty P. was on the other end of the line, as he kept ending every sentence with “you know?”
Again, you can call me judgemental, and this is probably getting worse as I age and continue to grow in this business. But having decided that this was a scam from the first minute that I received the offer, I was now simply pursuing this out of professional curiosity.
I called one of the “references” on his OREA rental application and, well, how do I describe this? Are you familiar with the term “space cadet?” Yes, a space cadet answered the phone, sounding confused, maybe stoned, and most certainly not professional.
I asked questions about the prospective tenant, and he said they worked together.
I asked, “What kind of work?”
He said, “Oh, you know, all kinds of things.”
I asked, “Like what?”
He cleared his throat, sounded a bit more believable, and gave me a sermon about the opportunity to derive income from online content creation. He explained that he and the prospective tenant were “collaborators” and that they were in the same field of providing direction on alternative investment strategies, doing speaking engagements for “corporate gigs,” and that they were both expert online day-traders.
The conversation was…..boss.
After I hung up the phone with the space cadet, I spent $30 of my own money to pull the prospective tenant’s Equifax report.
Good news: this was a real person, and this was his real name.
Bad news: he had a credit score of 550, which is the worst credit score that I had seen in years.
So who was he?
What was the scam? Did I even know that there was a scam?
Here’s the problem with scams in 2026:
People believe that if they can’t figure out the scam, then it’s not a scam. But scammers are better at scamming than the people they’re scamming.
This is entirely the point.
You don’t need to know what the scam is in order to be scammed.
I have no idea what these two clowns were getting at, but this was some sort of scam.
Yes, this guy showed a ton of money coming into his bank account. But who cares?
He didn’t seem to think it was a problem that $40,000 was being paid on his American Express every month. He thought that was “boss.” And I realize that some people would say, “If an individual were making $6,000,000 per year, then paying $40,000 per month on an American Express is insignificant.”
I don’t disagree, but I also don’t think that’s what this was.
Sure, there could be successful 25-year-olds who day-trade cryptocurrencies, spread their good word through social media and get paid for it, and drive Rolls-Royce Phantoms.
But you could take all those words above and put them into your search bar, and I’m sure you’ll find news articles about con artists.
So just to confirm my suspicions, I called the tenant’s agent and told him, “Great news, we’re going to move forward with your client.”
He let out an emphatic, “Alright!” and then I said, “We just need to complete our file, so I’ll need a driver’s license, passport, and his T1 General for 2024 and 2025.”
There was silence.
The silence was long enough for me to ask, “Are you there?”
He said, “Yeah, no problem. That’s no problem. Let me get back to you tomorrow, okay?”
And guess what?
I never heard from him again.
My curiosity was getting the best of me, so I called him, but the call went unanswered. I called him again the next day, and the day after. But nothing.
On the fourth day, I called him, and my call went straight to voicemail.
From then on, every time I called, it went to voicemail, meaning he had blocked my number.
I would do the same thing if I were running a real estate scam and somebody was trying to uncover it.
But maybe it wasn’t a scam, right?
Maybe this was just a high-flying, crypto-trading, champagne-popping, debt-ridden 25-year-old who made a ton of money and spent even more.
Maybe.
But I’m going to go with my gut on this one.
Sure, he’s got tens of thousands of followers on social media, but that doesn’t legitimize him. To be completely honest, it just makes me like him even less.
We ended up leasing the condo to a couple in their 50’s who relocated from Europe, as the gentleman was going to be working for a large financial firm here in Toronto for three years. It’s exactly the type of tenant that I would hope to attract. The proverbial transplant, and one that’s on a longer contract, hopefully meaning that my landlord-client can now go several years without having to fill the lease again.
As for the social media crypto-kid and his agent, Scotty P., I guess they’ll just have to move on to other options.
Unfortunately, I’ve encountered a lot of these scams over the last few years.
Here’s one that I wrote about last year:
September 25th, 2025: “Uncovering Scams In The Toronto Real Estate Market”
I had trouble finding that post because I could have sworn I wrote it this past summer, or maybe in the spring.
But here we are, over thirteen months later. It’s wild how quickly this year has flown by!
And if you liked this story and you’d be eager to hear another one just like it, don’t fret!
Another day, another scam in the Toronto rental market. I’m sure I’ll be back here with another tale very soon…
