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Rental scams are a type of advance fee fraud, in which the scammer tries toget a victim to pay a deposit to rent an apartment of which the scammerpretends to be the landlord. We specifically focused on fraudulent long-termrentals advertised in the UK on Craigslist. After a victim responds to thescammer's advertisement, the scammer attempts to persuade them to transfermoney without having seen the property. We were interested in which persuasiontechniques scammers use, and in assessing their skill at the art of persuasion.During a period of three weeks, we scraped 2112 letting advertisements,identified the fraudulent advertisements and had 44 conversations of around 4or 5 emails each with the scammers. Our analysis indicates that Cialdini`smarketing-based social persuasion strategies, such as liking, appeal toauthority, and the need for commitment and consistency are extensivelyimplemented by rental scammers. Of Stajano and Wilson's scam-based persuasionstrategies, an appeal to sympathy (i.e., kindness) and need for greed werecommonly used. We identified two further social persuasion strategies:establishing credibility and removing objections. At a superficial level,rental scammers seem skilled at their job, because they mimic genuine landlordsand use a range of effective persuasion techniques. However, when examiningtheir emails more closely, we see they often use pre-scripted emails, theirmimicry is often incompetent, and they have a lack of language skills andcultural knowledge that may tip people off. They appear to be the criminalequivalent of a boilerhouse sales operation, a modus operandi that has notpreviously been studied by cybercrime researchers.

The gift of the gab: Are rental scammers skilled at the art of persuasion?