I fortunately realized that First House Financial is pulling a scam before I lost any money to them so luckily I have not been harmed by them but I decided to post this to warn others.
I was looking for an apartment and came across an ad on Craigslist titled "$710 / 3br - 1427ft - Mirrored Closets—Hard Wood Flooring—Tons of Storage Available—" (there were also several similar ads on Craigslist). This sounded a bit too good to be true since most 3 bedrooms in this area are at least twice that much but the ad had a phone number so I decided to call to find out what the deal was (I had a feeling it was some sort of scam). The ad had no mention of a company and the phone number was a local number.
When I called a girl with a thick accent answered. I had a very hard time understanding what she was saying - she sounded Indian. I told her I had seen an ad for a 3 bedroom for $700 and asked her if that place was still available. She told me that it was and that they had many places like that. I asked her what area the rentals were in and she responded by asking me what area I'm looking for. I told her I was looking in the Palatine area and she said "Oh yes, we have many places in your area of interest. We have 86 3-bedrooms for $700 in your area". When I asked her exactly what area they were in she kept saying that they were in my "area of interest". When prodding her she no longer remembered what area I was interested in but she was sure that they had 86 units in my area.
I decided to ask her about another area, Springfield (there are many Springfields and I didn't specify the state), and she told me, again, that they had 86 3-bedrooms for $700. According to her they had 86 such places in every area all over the country but she couldn't explain why the amount of the available 3-bedrooms for $700 was the same everywhere.
When I asked her about available 2-bedrooms she told me that there were 28 2-bedrooms for $600 in my "area of interest". She still couldn't tell me what my area of interest was but she knew that they have 28 rentals there.in every area I asked about they had 86 3-bedrooms and 28 2-bedrooms in "the area of your interest". I'm assuming the girl was following a script that wasn't set up to respond to these kinds of questions.
She finally told me that to see these houses I have to go to their website - www.firsthousefinancial.com. On their homepage she asked me to enter my information and her name, Sophia. She wanted to walk me through it over the phone. There was a $9.99 fee for their "services" that had to be paid before I could access the website. I never took it that far but I assume that I would find no actual 3-bedroom rentals for $700 and they would have my $9.99 and my credit card number. When looking at their website I also saw that in addition to the $9.99 there is also a $29.99 monthly fee.
I can't say for sure what First House Financial's scam is but there is little doubt that there is something very fishy going on here and I urge other apartment hunters to stay away from the company and not give them any personal information or money.
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