A reader has contacted La Voz to report the scam of 3,000 euros that her father has suffered from an alleged landlady who rented a studio on El Antonio street, in Arrecife, near the bus station.
Currently, the woman's father lives in a shared apartment, so his intention is to find a home where he can live alone. The woman says that she is in a Facebook group where information about rentals in Lanzarote is shared and saw an offer where a furnished studio was rented just five minutes from the bus station.
"I gave my father the landlady's number so he could talk to her and the woman replied that she was not in Lanzarote, but in Madrid, but that she would come to the island on the weekend," she explains. "She told him that if he wanted to see it that day he had to make an advance payment of 500 euros so that only he would go to see the apartment and if he liked it he could keep it," she continues.
So that the man would not distrust, the woman sent him a photo of her supposed ID and promised him a video call. "The woman called him and was talking to my father and he told her that he liked the room," she says.
At that moment, the woman asked him to make an advance payment of 500 euros to be able to reserve the house for him, to which the man agreed. "She provided him with an account number and my father made the transfer, but it turns out that after a few minutes she writes to him again telling him that the money had not arrived and that he should do it again, but this time that he should send her 1,000 euros," she explains.
"He was alone and he made the transfer again but she told him that it had not arrived either, so he sent her more money again, which totaled approximately 3,000 euros," she indicates. After scamming him for that amount, the woman no longer answered calls or messages, so the man realized it was a scam.
The affected person went to file a complaint and at his bank they informed him that they could not respond to the fact because it had been a transfer that he authorized and made voluntarily. In addition, when filing the complaint with the Civil Guard, the agents told him that there were several complaints from that same phone and that same house and that they would investigate it.
"In the same Facebook group they have put similar publications and my father wrote to the woman again from another number and she told him the same thing again, that she was not on the island and that he had to give her an advance payment to be able to see the studio," she concludes.