“Balance of probabilities.”

That’s all you need to know, and remember, when you’re evaluating any offer to lease and a subsequent tenant application.

Balance of probabilities.

Keep that phrase near and dear.

I have this saying when it comes to scams, whether it’s related to property, banking, a knock on your door, or anything else:

You don’t need to know the scam for it to be a scam.

This is to say that scammers are better at scamming than we are, of course, and that if we only believe something is a scam once we’ve figured out the rouse, then we’re leaving ourselves incredibly vulnerable.

Years ago, I had a luxury rental for $10,000 per month.

I received an offer to lease and a photo of a bank draft for $20,000, which would serve as both first and last month’s rent.

The tenants were scammers, the application was fraudulent, and we came to this conclusion without an iota of reasonable doubt, but why and how isn’t the point.  The question that everybody was asking at the time, and that you might ask at this juncture, is: what kind of scam would see the tenants fork over $20,000?

You could argue, “Maybe the tenants never intended to pay the deposit.”

But let’s say that they were.  In fact, let’s say that they did.

What could the scam be?

Maybe they intended to fraudulently re-lease the property and collect $20,000 deposits from five, ten, or twenty unsuspecting tenants.  Not a bad return on investment, right?

My point is: you don’t need to know the scam for it to be a scam.

This is how scammers operate.  If they can think up a scam that makes no sense, seems unlikely, or is one that nobody would ever see coming, then they have protection from exposure.

When I’m reviewing an offer to lease for my landlord clients, I essentially go into every review assuming that the offer is fraudulent, and working backwards from there.  I had an agent tell me recently, “Oh, that’s a great way to go through life, really a cup-half-full kinda guy aren’t you?”  But his tenants would prove to be scammers in the end, or on the balance of probabilities, they weren’t people we wanted to work with

And this is the point I made a moment ago: you need not deduce the scam and expose the scammers in order to refuse an application and candidate, but rather, you merely need to satisfy yourself that the application is fraudulent on the balance of probabilities.

Why take any chances in this rental market?

Last month, I received an offer to lease on a luxury townhouse, priced at $7,000 per month.

The candidates were a male/female couple, aged 31 and 29, respectively.

She worked in healthcare, and he worked in construction.

Their credit reports were fantastic.  Their incomes were excellent.

On the surface, they looked like incredible candidates who would be a perfect fit for this property and the folks who own it.

Upon beginning my review, I started to notice a few red flags that on their own, weren’t problematic, but which collectively was a cause for concern.

First and foremost, neither of them was on social media.

That shouldn’t be a red flag.  I mean, I wish none of us were on social media, but we live in 2025…

The more I dug, the more I saw that they were complete ghosts online.

I asked their agent to send me LinkedIn profiles for both candidates, and she said, “They’re not on LinkedIn.”

That’s also a possibility, of course.  I’m not judging, I’m just digging…

Given that she was in the healthcare field, I would have expected to find her name on an association website or something pertaining to her schooling.  After all, the Internet is infinite.  I can’t tell you how many times I Google a prospective tenant and find a short article about their excellent varsity volleyball game at Western University, circa 2012.

The property was located in Oakville, and their two jobs were located in Milton and Grimsby, respectively.  Again, this isn’t a problem, but something to investigate.  Oakville is in between both work locations, but I wanted to get some more information.

I asked their agent, “How come they’re looking to plant roots in Oakville, given their jobs?”

He said, “Well, they both work from home, so the location of their respective employers doesn’t really matter.”

That was when I realized I had reeled in a big fish.  A red herring.

On his rental application and employment letter, it said he was a “Machine Operator.”

How does a machine operator work from home?

I asked the agent, and he paused, stuttered, and then said, “Umm, I think….I think he’s in management.”

I said, “But the employment letter doesn’t specify management.  It merely specifies a machine operator.  How does he operate machines from home?”

Try as I may to picture this guy sitting at home with a Joystick like the ones we had in the 1980’s, staring at a monitor, virtually moving giant skids of building materials in a construction yard, I just couldn’t commit to believing it.”

The agent said, “I could probably get some more information on that…”

In the meantime, my client and I were looking over their employment letters and pay stubs.

Here’s where I can’t take credit for uncovering what we believe was a scam, however.  You see, my client is an accountant and thus she has what Liam Neeson would call, “A particular set of skills.”  She took to the pay stubs and sent me the following issues:

1) Both candidates have the exact same pay period.  This is not a cause for alarm, but it’s coincidental.

2) Both candidates were paid on January 1st.  Under the Employment Standards Act, if a pay period falls on a holiday, the employee must be paid beforehand.

3) She has contributed far more in CPP than he has; however, she has a significantly lower income.  That’s not possible.

4) There is no accounting for vacation accruals.  That doesn’t conform to accepted accounting principles.

5) Their year-to-date taxes are incorrect, based on their stated incomes.  That’s a problem.

6) Their federal and provincial exemptions are both incorrect, based on their stated incomes.  That’s also a problem.

None of this made any sense at all.

Considering that the candidates worked for different companies, it was extremely unlikely that both companies would make such egregious errors in their accounting.

The more likely explanation was that both sets of pay stubs were fake.

After all, would you know much CPP would accrue every month, based on a stated income, just from a glance at a piece of paper?  Had it not been for the landlord/accountant, we would have simply glanced over these stubs and said, “This looks good.”

The final straw came when we called the tenant’s landlord, and the number was registered to a registered real estate agent in Niagara Falls.  He sounded a bit confused before providing a suspect reference for the candidates.

Does all this add up to a smoking gun?

No.

But on the balance of probabilities, do you want to lease to these two people?

Absolutely not.

I believe that the pay stubs and the employment letters were fraudulent, but I don’t need to prove it.  I just need to add up enough red flags to say, “Why take the risk?”

Here’s a second story from the past month…

I had a $4,000 per month condominium listing on Toronto’s waterfront.

We received a lease offer and application from a single 30-year-old male who worked in technology.

Pardon the generalization here, but I find that an overwhelming number of scammers say that they work in technology.  After all, can you think of another field with a greater number of start-ups or companies whose businesses we don’t understand?

The applicant’s credit score was in the 800’s and his income was $295,000 per year, which was more than enough to qualify for this condo.

The first red flag for me came when I looked at his employment letter.

The letter read that he was the Chief Financial Officer of the company, that he had been employed there since June of 2018, and that his salary was $295,000 per year.

But at the bottom of the letter, instead of it being signed by “Jane Smith,” it was simply signed, “XYZ Technology Co.,” ie. the name of the company itself.

Any of us can create a fake employment letter right now, if we want to.

1) Right-click “save as” on any corporate logo.
2) Insert the log into an MS Word doc in the top right corner.
3) Copy-and-paste a boiler-plate employment letter that you find online.
4) Search LinkedIn for the name of somebody in Human Resources at the corporation of your choosing.
5) Auto-generate a signature for that name.
6) Save as PDF.

Voila!

Sure, if somebody calls the person in H.R. named in the letter, then the rouse is up.  But many landlords don’t actually call the references; they just look at the letters and applications.

In any event, the employment letter that I received from XYZ Technology Co, signed by “XYZ Technology Co.,” had the following note under the signature:

“For more information, please contact our HR specialist at (647)-222-1111, or email hr**********@***********gy.com.”

That’s not how employment letters read.

Employment letters, er, I mean real employment letters, contain the contact information for the individual who signs the document.

I called the number and it went right to a voice mailbox.

There was no, “Hi, you’ve reached Kathleen Jones, Human Resources Manager for XYZ Technology Co.,” but rather just an automated voice.

At this point, I was incredibly suspicious, so I left a voicemail asking them to call me back.

In the meantime, I had the tenant’s credit report, which was only one page and looked like it had been scanned.

This is another major red flag.

Once upon a time, sure, we scanned documents.  But in today’s day and age, you don’t go from a printed credit report to scanning one into a PDF, but rather, the document is downloaded into a PDF either from Equifax or TransUnion.

Not only that, the document was one page.  Credit reports are usually 10+ pages.

I called the tenant’s agent and asked him, “Can you tell me why the credit report is only one page long?”

He paused and said, “Umm, I think that’s what he got.  It’s all they gave him.”

It was an Equifax credit report, and this was the second page of the report – the one after the page with the person’s name.

I said, “Why don’t you see if you can track down the rest of the report and get back to me?”

He said that he would.

Then I looked up the tenant’s current place of residence in our MLS system and saw that it had last been leased in June of 2021, and the cooperating agent was not the agent who had submitted the lease on the tenant’s behalf this time around.

That’s fine, though, right?  The tenant could be using a different agent.

I called the agent back and said, “Just checking in on a few more things here.  Where does the tenant live now?”

The agent gave me the address that corresponded with the rental application, and I asked, “How long has he been there for?”

He said, “Um, I think, like, maybe since 2022?”

That’s fin,e though, right?  Maybe he has a bad memory?

I said, “Did you get him set up here?”

The agent said, “Yeah, he’s a buddy.  I got him the place in like 2022.”

That was incorrect.

Hardly a “gotcha” but according to MLS, a different agent at a different brokerage leased that unit.

Again, there could be an explanation for it, but when I have to go searching for explanations, I lose interest in the application.

A few hours later, I received a phone call from “Private Number” and I answered it.

The voice said, “Hello, this is the HR Specialist calling from XYZ Technology Co.”

No name.

Not “Daniel, the HR Specialist,” of course.  Just a random voice on the other end of the line, calling from a private number.

I made small talk to warm the person up and then said that I had the employment letter in front of me and wanted to confirm a few things.

The voice on the other end of the line was delightfully accommodating!

I asked, “Can you confirm that (person) has been with the company since March of 2017, is employed as the Chief Executive Officer, and currently commands a salary of $395,000 per year?”

The voice paused for effect, gave a “do do dooo” as he was pretending to read something in front of him, and then said, “Yes, that’s all correct.”

Thanked the voice for his time and ended the call.

This call was as close to a “smoking gun” as I would ever find.

Because according to the employment letter provided, this person started in June of 2018,  not March of 2017, was the Chief Financial Officer, not the Chief Executive Officer, and was paid a salary of $295,000, not $395,000.

But that’s not all!

I’m always curious to know more, even when I know it’s a scam, so I went looking for profiles on social media.  I found two issues on LinkedIn and one on Facebook.

First of all, the LinkedIn profile said that he had been working there for 13 years and 7 months, which did not align with the June, 2018 start date from the employment letter.

Second of all, this person was 30-years-old.  So unless this person had been working there since he was sixteen or seventeen years old, the math didn’t add up.

I was able to find a Facebook page for a person with the same name and a similar photo.

The page hadn’t been updated since 2021 and simply contained photos of this person posing on the hood of luxury cars and standing in front of luxury buildings and worldwide landmarks.

There are only two reasons why a single man in his mid-to-late 20’s has a social media profile consisting of nothing but him posing in front of luxury cars:

1) He’s a con artist.
2) He’s a douche.

On the balance of probabilities, this rental application was fraudulent.

I called the tenant’s agent back a couple more times to request more information and some clarification, and he never called me back.

That too is a sign that the agent could be complicit.

And before you ask if I reported this guy to the “authorities,” I would encourage you to look outside right now because somebody is probably committing murder and getting bail the next day, so what the hell are we going to do about a little rental fraud?

Sorry for the negativity.  Not sorry for the facts.

But yeah, I’ve had people ask me “what I’m doing about it,” and it makes me feel all the more defeated.  Years ago, I uncovered a massive fraud ring with the help of two agents from another brokerage, and we did “report” this to some real estate authorities, but they never got back to us.  Maybe it was disinterest on their part, or maybe they share my cynical view of the state of the criminal justice system in Canada, but it wasn’t for lack of effort on our part.

I have seen more fraudulent rental applications of late than ever before.

As I said, I come into every application review merely assuming that there’s fraud, and I work backwards from there.

I would encourage every real estate agent and landlord to do the same…