A resident of Costa Teguise has spoken with La Voz to warn about the alleged scam being carried out by two people in which they rent houses that are not theirs so that other people occupy them in exchange for money.
It all starts when this resident's brother rented his house two years ago to a couple who finally ended up not paying the rent in April 2024. After that, this year they managed to get both of them to leave the house.
The woman, who lives next to her brother's house, began to notice strange movements that led her to discover that this couple was being helped by two men. "We realized that when the eviction date was approaching, these guys started appearing more at my brother's house and we saw strange movements," she says.
This is where they realized that these two men are allegedly the ones who manage a kind of 'squatter real estate agency', that is, they are the ones who take care of seeing which houses can be occupied, they carry it out and rent them for money to other people. In this sense, the resident explains that "they found a house a hundred meters from mine for the tenants who were squatting in my brother's house to move into as well".
Therefore, those responsible for this scam make two moves. On the one hand, they put some squatters in and take others out, and in her brother's house they assigned others to keep the house occupied. That is, some people paid to enter the house but, if the police managed to kick them out of the house, this money was not returned to them. "Apparently the police know who these people are," she says, referring to the fact that the agents have probably received more complaints about these individuals.
After these events, her brother called the Civil Guard to try to get both of them out of his house. "With the eviction order, the agents kicked them out," she says.
In addition, she explains that after recovering his house, her brother "had to hire private security to watch the house and prevent them from squatting the house again because these two guys kept coming back every night to see if they could get in again and, from the third night, what they did was come to see if the security was still there or not".
Now, these 'squatters' are in another nearby house that was empty, since, according to this resident, "it belongs to some German women whose parents died and they inherited this house". They also managed to get in touch with them to tell them about the occupation of the house, so one of them moved to Lanzarote and is in the process of being able to evict them from the house.
"It is an uncertainty and an impotence to be in this situation, in the last six months, the police have come on 15 occasions," she says.
Damage to the house
After recovering the house, they found various damages caused by the 'squatters'. "The kitchen extractor fan is completely burned and melted, and all the walls of the house have holes," she says.
In addition, they also found the door frames broken, macaroni stuck to the ceiling and the walls dirty "as if there had been a pitched battle".
