The room is real, the photos are good, the price is only slightly below market. The owner explains that they have taken a job in another country, they are letting the flat out through a courier service, and they will send you the keys as soon as the deposit clears. They are apologetic about not being able to show you around.
This is one story with one purpose, and it has been running against international students for over a decade. The absent landlord is not a coincidence or bad luck — it is the mechanism. Everything else in the conversation exists to make the absence sound normal.
Why the story is always the same
The scammer needs three things to be true at once:
- You cannot see the property. Otherwise you would discover that someone already lives there.
- You cannot meet them. Otherwise you would want ID that matches the ownership record.
- You still feel the transaction is normal. Otherwise you would not send money.
"I am abroad for work" solves all three in one sentence. That is why it appears in almost every version of this scam, whether the stated country is the UK, the UAE, the United States, or somewhere in West Africa.
The problem is not that the landlord is abroad. Plenty of real Dutch landlords are. The problem is being abroad and unwilling to arrange any verifiable, real-time contact with the property.
The full script, in order
Recognising the sequence is more useful than memorising red flags.
Stage 1 — the qualification
You get a long, personal reply. They ask about your studies, whether you smoke, whether you are quiet. It reads like a landlord who cares. It is establishing that this is a relationship, not a transaction, which makes the later request harder to refuse.
Stage 2 — the explanation
The absence is introduced, usually with more detail than necessary. A specific employer, a specific contract length, sometimes a photo of a passport or an ID card. Photos of ID prove nothing — they are stolen or generated, and you have no way to check either.
Stage 3 — the trusted third party
This is the stage that catches careful people. To reassure you, they introduce an intermediary: an escrow service, a "rental agency" handling the keys, sometimes a fake Airbnb or Booking.com flow. You receive an email that looks like it comes from a real company, with real-looking branding, telling you your payment is protected and will only be released once you have inspected the property.
None of it is real. The email domain will be subtly wrong (airbnb-secure-rentals.com, booking-payments.net). The "protection" is the entire pitch.
Stage 4 — the transfer
You send money. What arrives is either nothing, or a set of keys that do not open anything, sometimes with a real address you can stand outside of while the current tenants explain that their flat is not for rent.
Ten minutes of checks that end it
Each one is quick, and any single failure is enough to walk away.
- Demand a live video call. Not a recording, not photos. A live call where you ask them to go to the window and describe the street, then open a specific cupboard. Scammers do not have access to the property, so they cannot do this. This one test defeats the scam on its own.
- Check the email domain letter by letter. Real Airbnb mail comes from
airbnb.com. Real Booking mail comes frombooking.com. Anything with an extra word or hyphen is fake, no matter how good the logo is. - Look up the address on the Kadaster. If the registered owner is not the person you are talking to, they must be able to explain the relationship and show written permission to sublet.
- Reverse image search every photo. Stolen listing photos are the norm.
- Ask for a Dutch phone number and call it. Not WhatsApp — an actual call. Scammers avoid live voice contact because accents and background noise contradict the story.
- Search the exact wording of the listing. Scam texts get reused. Pasting a distinctive sentence into Google often turns up the same "room" in four other cities.
Want a housing plan that doesn't rely on luck?
Two minutes, free, and built around your city and your timeline.
What legitimate remote renting looks like
Some real situations do involve a landlord who cannot meet you. Here is how those differ:
| Legitimate | Scam |
|---|---|
| Happy to do a live video walkthrough | Only recorded video, or excuses |
| A named Dutch agency you can look up in the KVK register | An "escrow service" you have never heard of |
| Payment to an account named in a signed contract | Payment to a personal account, or a link they sent |
| A local contact — a family member, tenant, or agent — who can let you in | Nobody in the country can show you the property |
| Relaxed about you doing checks | Impatient, or offended that you asked |
Anyone with a genuine property will pass all five. The Dutch chamber of commerce register at kvk.nl lets you check whether an agency actually exists.
The variant to watch for in August
Between mid-July and mid-September, when every student in the country is desperate, the same scam appears in a compressed form: no relationship-building, no long messages, just a plausible listing and a fast demand for a "reservation fee" of €150–€300 to hold a viewing slot.
The smaller amount is deliberate. It is low enough that people pay it without doing checks, and low enough that most victims never report it. Charging you a fee to attend a viewing is not legitimate under any circumstances.
If it already happened to you
Call your bank first and ask them to attempt a recall — this only works within hours. Then file a fraud report at politie.nl, report the account details to the platform, and post the phone number and IBAN in the city's student housing group. You will not be the only person that account has taken money from.
Read next
- The Deposit-Before-Viewing Scam — the core version of this fraud
- How to Spot and Avoid Dutch Rental Scams — every red flag in one place
- Templates for Messaging Dutch Landlords — how to sound like a serious tenant on real listings
Frequently asked questions
The landlord sent a photo of their passport. Isn't that proof?
No. ID photos circulating in scam networks are stolen from real people or edited, and you have no way to verify one from a picture. Identity documents only mean something when checked against something else — for example, when the name matches the registered owner in the Kadaster record for that address, and the person can appear on a live video call from inside the property.
They're using Airbnb to handle the payment. Doesn't that protect me?
Only if you are genuinely on Airbnb. The standard trick is an email that imitates Airbnb or Booking.com and links to a copy of their payment page. Check the sending domain character by character, and never follow a payment link someone sent you. If a booking is real, you can find it by logging into the actual site yourself.
What if they refuse a video call but everything else looks fine?
Walk away. A live video call costs a real landlord four minutes and proves they have access to the property. Refusing it, while asking you to send money for that same property, is the whole scam in one exchange. There is no good-faith reason to decline.
Is it legal for a Dutch landlord to charge a fee just for a viewing?
No. Charging prospective tenants for viewings or for being placed on a list is not permitted, and letting agents cannot charge you a mediation fee when they are acting for the landlord. If someone wants money before you have any tenancy at all, that is a scam or an illegal practice, and in either case you should not pay it.
How do scammers get real Dutch addresses to use?
They copy them from genuine listings on rental sites, from expired advertisements, and sometimes from properties actually for sale. This is why an address existing on Street View proves very little on its own — the building is real, the connection between the building and the person messaging you is not.