No Way Home

Co-written by Jacob Dutkiewicz and Oscar Schulze Casademunt

23/02/2024

Anna’s story

Anna Astakhov rushes through the streets of Groningen gripping her suitcase firmly, while it bounces off the uneven cobblestones. The student weaves between unconcerned pedestrians as they take in the last days of summer. Running on adrenaline, she hopes against hope that her landlord simply forgot to pick her up from the station. It has been hours since their last email.

She turns a corner, and her phone vibrates. She has reached the address. Anna sets her luggage down on the kerb and looks up at the lifeless house. As she searches for the number plaque, an elderly couple approaches her. “Are you moving in here?”, they ask.

She replies that she is, not really concentrating on the pair. She looks down at her phone, then back up at the couple. “I’m sorry, but we think you’ve been scammed.”

She sits down on the kerb. “I know,” she says simply. And she starts to cry. 

Grote Kromme Elleboog 22. Anna’s address.

Unfortunately, Anna’s story is not unique. Every year, many students in Groningen are tricked by scams just like this. Just two days prior, Anna recalls, another girl fell prey to the exact same scam and stood in front of the exact same house.

“It was even worse for her,” Anna says. “She had nobody in Groningen. I at least had some friends I could stay with for a few days.”

This solution was only short term, however. After being scammed out of €1500 and having to rent an Airbnb for a month, she managed to find a place. Sadly, her rental agreement expires at the end of this month, so she’s back to square one.

The search for housing in the Netherlands is notoriously difficult, especially so in Groningen, with an estimated shortage of 7400 houses, predicted to rise to 10.000 by 2025. 

Running out of time

Anna first encountered the offer in May, when she started to look for accommodation well in advance. At the time, her friends warned her that something wasn’t right, so she looked elsewhere. Three months later, and still without accommodation, she was getting anxious.

“I was so desperate that I did not see the red flags,” Anna says. She returned to the initial offer at the end of August, just a week before she was due to resume her studies in Groningen. Again, she talked it over with her friends, who this time told her to go for it, as they knew about the existence of the house.

She contacted the scammer, who provided her with an extensive background story. Anna then asked if her friend, who was in the city, could view the property. The scammer claimed that she was away in Germany for her parents’ anniversary and could not organise a viewing.

Anna was growing uneasy, but time was running out. To further convince her, the scammer sent Anna photos of her passport. The Groninger found that this passport used to belong to an Austrian theatre executive living in Switzerland, who lost it years prior. She was not aware that her likeness was being used to scam people in the Netherlands.   

The Stolen Identity Document

The seemingly authentic identity document was enough to persuade Anna to sign the rental agreement. After putting pen to paper, she was then asked for payment, a practice Anna saw as standard in the Netherlands. “It makes sense they want payment before the beginning of September because that’s how Dutch houses operate.”

And so, she sent the money.

Gone with the wind

“Once you send the money, it’s gone,” says Rik Kiers, a lawyer from Steunpunt Huren, a legal advice centre for housing in Groningen. “When the damage has already been done there's nothing we can do,” Rik explains. “We are not the police.”

Rik says that it is certainly not normal to demand any sort of payment before signing the contract and receiving the keys to your apartment. “Landlords are forbidden to charge any costs related to the rental contract because the landlord is himself responsible for these kinds of costs.”

Rik says that housing scams are unfortunately an inevitable reality. “There will always be bad people who find new ways to exploit others.” While scams might be impossible to escape from in the online world, the severe housing shortage in Groningen does not help.

Out of options

“It’s a desperation game,” says Luc Tej-Guimberteau, a French undergraduate student who narrowly avoided getting scammed. “Scammers are looking for someone who will pay because they're in a situation where they really need a house. And this is becoming my situation."

Luc is starting an internship in April and has been looking for a house for two months, without success. “It’s literally hell trying to find lodging,” he admits, explaining that his situation is worsened by the fact that he told his internship company he had found accommodation. “They asked several times if I had found something,” he said, “and I was scared that if I said no, they would retract the offer.”

He has been using Facebook groups to find housing after being recommended the site by a friend who lives in Den Haag. Luc says that despite being a social media site, Facebook groups are widely regarded as the best way to get legitimate housing. “I didn't have many doubts because my friend was telling me they found their lodging through a group.”

Luc quickly realized, however, how many scammers there are in these groups. “Someone from our generation can see very clearly these profiles are fake,” he says, describing the sheer number of accounts without profile pictures or posts on their timeline. “It’s been a terrible place to look,” he reflects.

Gatherers and Closers

A pattern that Luc has noticed among scammers is the splitting of roles into ‘gatherers’ and ‘closers’. Gatherers are the people that infiltrate legitimate housing groups on Facebook, putting out fake posts, messaging students in need of a room and then directing them towards the next step in the scam chain. Gatherers usually claim that they are previous tenants or sub-letting the property in question.

Their counterparts, the closers, identify themselves as the owners or landlords of the apartment. They operate through messaging platforms such as WhatsApp. These individuals are responsible for distributing contracts and ensuring that the student makes payments, either in the form of deposits or exorbitant registration fees.

The 'gatherer’ that contacted Luc is, according to her profile, a French university student named Pauline, who lives in Utrecht. She is also a member of several housing groups across the Netherlands.

Luc was messaged by several accounts after introducing himself in a housing group with a post stating he needed accommodation. He says it was difficult at first to tell who was a scammer. "At first I thought they seemed like a normal person who genuinely knew someone who was renting out their apartment, so they directed me to a different person.”

After enquiring about the property, Luc was quickly pressured by the scammer. “Immediately he’s asking, I want to know if you’re a serious person and ready to rent the apartment.” Growing suspicious, Luc then asked if he could attend a viewing of the property. At this point, Luc says, the scammer stopped replying and removed his profile picture.

Luc is one of the lucky ones, and says he no longer checks Facebook groups because they are full of fraudulent listings. “Half of the posts, maybe even more, are scams,” he says.

Backed into a corner

Yiğit Bezek, an undergraduate from Turkey, started looking for a place well in advance, just like the others. “I started months in advance but with arranging the visas, permits and insurances it quickly got away from me."  He began his search on websites but quickly ran out of patience after being rejected countless times.  

Advised to expand his search to Facebook groups by some of his friends, Yiğit says he started responding to every advert. “I was in my final exam week, I was running out of time,” he recounts. He thought he finally caught a break when the poster of a Facebook advert responded to his request.

Yiğit was then asked to provide extra information about himself and was redirected to the person he thought was the owner of the apartment.

That’s when the mind games started. The landlord claimed that the apartment Yiğit was after, had already been rented. However, he had a different room that was about to become available. Yiğit received some photographs which looked reasonable enough and was asked to immediately come to Groningen to sign the contract.

“He knew I couldn’t do that, that I was still in Turkey,” says Yiğit. The landlord proposed to sign an online contract instead, which would require Yiğit to put down the deposit and registration fee as a down payment. Without an alternative and just a few weeks away from the start of term, “I had no choice but sign the contract,” he says.

What Yiğit didn’t know

What Yiğit did not know was that the photographs he received were fake. Ripped off a website of an estate agent for a room in Madrid, Spain.

One of the photos received by Yiğitz

Screenshot from the website Housing Anywhere

Neither did he know that the contract he received and signed was a shoddy template, frequently used by scammers. Rik Kiers says he encounters that exact same template frequently and discourages anyone from signing anything that looks remotely suspicious.

Yiğitz's contract

“Usually, I can see within 10 minutes if the contract is legitimate,” Rik says. He advises tenants to look out for short and poorly written documents. “If the bank account registered with a German name in Argentina, it’s probably a red flag.”

Not being a native speaker himself, the contract and the messages being written in broken English did not raise his suspicions, neither did the bank account registered in Lithuania or the landlord’s obvious manipulation.

Some of the communication that Yiğitz received from his ‘landlord’.

“I didn’t know what else to do. I was completely hopeless, so I just prayed and sent the money,” Yiğit says. After he transferred the requested amount, the landlord went quiet. “After a week or two the number was deactivated,” he added.

Yiğit was forced to come to Groningen without a house but managed to find something here relatively quickly.

Small steps

The city council know about the number of housing scams, but consider landlord malpractice a higher priority, argues Daan Sweats, spokesperson for Studenten Stad, the Groningen student party with seats on the council. “To tackle it we want to introduce a permit system,” he says, “so if someone is found guilty of malpractice in the past we we can deny them a rental permit.”

However, the problem at the heart of this is still the housing shortage, Daan explains. “Even if we have those systems in place, if somebody cannot find any housing, they will take a risk with bad landlords.”  

Daan also believes that not nearly enough is being done to inform students about the extent of the problem. He says that the university (RUG) kept putting money overseas to attract international students but was not active enough in informing them about the reality of finding housing in the city.

Although last year the university implored all prospective students not to come to Groningen without housing, Daan still thinks more steps must be taken. “All they care about is if you found a place. If you have oh that’s great than come to Groningen. That’s not enough.”

Ken Hesselink, chair of the GSB, the Groningen student union, says the union tries to spread awareness. “We actively try to inform students and make them aware of the problem,” he says, explaining that the GSB distribute a ‘room book’ with housing advice to students during the introduction period of their studies.

Countless students still do not have a roof over their heads. Even the ones that do, like Yiğit and Anna face the prospect of finding new accommodation within the next few weeks. The search for housing for housing is relentless and so are the scammers that continue to target vulnerable students.