Zürich has such a big problem with apartment fraud that the police has a specific department working on just this.
I have first hand experience with a similar fraud in Zürich. I had an apartment which I looked for a new tenant to. During my search there was a ”woman” that contacted me and said that she was interested. She behaved really weirdly and couldn’t come on the showing, but requested some videos. I didn’t think more about it and send over a ”digital showing” where I showed certain parts of the apartment. We later found a new tenant and she moved in. I didn’t think more about it.
Fast forward 3 months and a random man knocks on my door during the morning. He asked if I was <insert my name>, and I said yes. He then asked if I rented out the apartment above (which was my old apartment). After explaining that we’d already found a tenant for it, he just said: ”F*ck, then I‘ve been scammed“.
It turned out that this strange ”woman” actually just used me as one side of their scam, getting credible videos where I talked and showed the apartment. The scammers then used all my ad pictures, my name and address to put up a fake ad.
He moved from Austria and paid ~2000 euro in deposit, then arrived to an apartment that was already rented out. He showed me a fradulent contract and my videos I previously sent.
After all of this, I did an image search using my apartment pictures, and found and took down 3 fake listings on different websites.
The article was well written, really enjoyed it and I learned something as a Swiss citizen using this outlet every day! But I agree with the other commenters, I would replace the AI generated images with something else, they drag drown the articles credibility IMO
I work the email security company xorlab[0], where my colleagues and I did a thorough analysis of real subscription/email bombing waves that we saw at our customers[1].
Here are some interesting additional information from the attacks we analyzed:
* Email bombing as a service is a thing, where you can buy 10,000 credits for $10 and easily bomb target inboxes with over 2000 emails per hour.
* Most all email bombing attacks starts in the morning, between 8-10.
This has happened for a while. In February of this year, the same attack vector was used in an attack to trick developers into thinking that they'd got a job offer from GitHub: https://www.xorlab.com/en/blog/phishing-on-github
This is a while back, but I designed and built an AI-art installation from scratch, where I trained a GAN network to generate abstract art. The generated images was shown on a Samsung The Frame, and below the screen was a button. If you pushed the button, a new and unique piece was generated and shown on the screen.
I have first hand experience with a similar fraud in Zürich. I had an apartment which I looked for a new tenant to. During my search there was a ”woman” that contacted me and said that she was interested. She behaved really weirdly and couldn’t come on the showing, but requested some videos. I didn’t think more about it and send over a ”digital showing” where I showed certain parts of the apartment. We later found a new tenant and she moved in. I didn’t think more about it.
Fast forward 3 months and a random man knocks on my door during the morning. He asked if I was <insert my name>, and I said yes. He then asked if I rented out the apartment above (which was my old apartment). After explaining that we’d already found a tenant for it, he just said: ”F*ck, then I‘ve been scammed“.
It turned out that this strange ”woman” actually just used me as one side of their scam, getting credible videos where I talked and showed the apartment. The scammers then used all my ad pictures, my name and address to put up a fake ad.
He moved from Austria and paid ~2000 euro in deposit, then arrived to an apartment that was already rented out. He showed me a fradulent contract and my videos I previously sent.
After all of this, I did an image search using my apartment pictures, and found and took down 3 fake listings on different websites.