I started emailing with someone I thought was Puzio in April after getting a job for CPR News. I was looking for housing in a rental market that was a shock coming from the reasonably priced Pittsburgh. The average rent for a one-bedroom there is between $1,000 and $1,500 — in metro Denver, it’s around $1,700 and $2,000.
And here was this beautiful, furnished rental on Craigslist. After a few back-and-forth emails, I sent $665 for a security deposit.
After realizing the red flags and the gut feeling that something wasn’t right, I found the number for the real Puzio and called, hoping that she was the same person I’d emailed and paid. Nope. That money was gone.
I hadn’t even set foot in Colorado before I was scammed trying to find a place to live in Denver.
How common is the issue?
How pervasive and common rental scams are in the state is hard to pin down. As a journalist, I set out to find how many people may have met the same embarrassing fate I had. But law enforcement agencies don’t routinely track this specific type of scam. The Denver Police Department said they suspected there were large scamming operations located overseas.
And that it’s extremely hard and nearly impossible for police to track and catch scammers when they use different types of burner accounts — fake email accounts and social media handles.
According to data released by the Better Business Bureau’s scam tracker, Colorado had the 4th most rental scams per capita in…
