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How we score apartment listings for scam risk

Last verified . Covers the heuristics behind Apartment scam check.

The SuperNYC apartment scam checker reads a pasted listing and scores it against a catalog of heuristics derived from authoritative anti-scam guidance. This page documents what those heuristics are, where each one came from, how the weights are calibrated, and what we deliberately don't try to detect.

What this tool is (and isn't)

The scam checker is a pattern matcher running entirely in your browser — the listing text you paste in never leaves your device. It looks for specific phrases and price patterns that consistently appear in NYC apartment scams and produces a risk score with a per-rule explanation.

It is nota verification service. We can't confirm that a real apartment exists at a given address. We can't verify that the broker is licensed. We can't tell you that a landlord you've never met is real. What we can do is catch the textual patterns that appear over and over in scam corpora documented by NYPD, FTC, NY DOS, and StreetEasy.

Treat the result as a first-pass filter. A green "low risk" verdict doesn't guarantee a listing is real — it means the text doesn't match common scam patterns. A red "high risk" verdict means the text matches enough scam patterns that the listing should be verified in person before any money or personal information changes hands.

Authoritative sources

Every heuristic in our catalog traces back to at least one of these authoritative sources, all linked here for your verification:

  • NYPD Crime Prevention Tips: "Rental Listing Scam" — NYPDcptips_RentalScam.pdf. Names specific payment products (Western Union, Money Gram, Green Dot Money Pak), the "out of area, state or country" excuse, and the "false set" of keys delivered to a neutral location.
  • NY Department of State, Division of Consumer Protection consumer alert — dos.ny.gov consumer alert. Calls out wire transfers, prepaid debit cards, cash-based payment apps, urging the renter to "rent quickly," and the "request personal information and money for background checks, then disappear" pattern.
  • FTC Consumer Advice: "Rental Listing Scams" — consumer.ftc.gov — rental-listing-scams. Names wire transfer, gift card, and cryptocurrency by name; documents the listing-takeover pattern (scammer copies a legit listing and replaces contact info).
  • StreetEasy Blog: "How to Avoid Being the Victim of a Rental Scam in NYC" — streeteasy.com/blog/nyc-rental-scams. Nine-section guide. Documents below-market pricing, missing exact street address, all-cash deals, and luxury-building impersonation.
  • NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection FAQ on the FARE Act — nyc.gov DCWP FAQ. Source for the 2025+ legal context on broker fees.
  • NY Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (HSTPA)— codified at NY Real Property Law §238-a and §234. Source for the $20 application-fee cap, the 1-month security-deposit cap, and the prohibition on separate pet-deposit charges.

2025+ legal context (what changed)

The FARE Act — effective June 11, 2025

The NYC FARE Act fundamentally changed which broker-fee patterns are suspicious. Under the FARE Act, a landlord or landlord's agent cannot impose or collect a broker's fee from a prospective tenant. A tenant only pays a broker's fee if the tenant hired the broker directly.

This has two consequences for the scam catalog:

  • "No fee" listings are now standard, not suspicious. Older guides (pre-2025) sometimes flagged "no fee" as a possible bait-and-switch — that's stale and we don't replicate it.
  • A listing offering a "discount" for paying broker fees up front is now itself a FARE Act violation and a suspicious signal. We catch this.

Statutory caps that make over-charging automatic red flags

Two specific statutory caps from the 2019 HSTPA double as scam signals because they're both illegal and scammer-popular:

  • $20 maximum application/credit-check fee. A listing demanding $50 or $100 application fees is breaking the law regardless of scam intent.
  • 1-month maximum security deposit. "First, last, and security" is illegal under HSTPA. Demands for "two months security" or "three months upfront" are simultaneously illegal and a strong scam indicator.

Demands above these caps are simultaneously illegal under NY law and a strong scam indicator. We flag them because either way the user shouldn't engage.

Patterns that used to be suspicious but no longer are

Worth being explicit about what we don't flag, so future contributors don't accidentally re-introduce stale signals:

  • "No fee" listings — standard under the FARE Act, see above.
  • Direct-from-landlord listings without a broker — legitimate and common; mom-and-pop NYC landlords self-list constantly.
  • Lower-than-Manhattan rent in outer boroughs — that's geography, not a scam signal. We only flag rent that's low relative to its own neighborhood's median.
  • A listing asking for ID at lease signing — standard practice. Only the "asks for SSN/bank info before viewing" pattern is suspicious.
  • Strict no-pets language — legal and common.

The heuristic catalog (organized by category)

The full catalog has roughly 20 named heuristics. They're organized into four categories — payment red flags, communication red flags, listing-content red flags, and process red flags. Below is the summary; the full per-rule detection logic and false-positive risk notes live in our source code with citations to the authority above.

Payment red flags

The highest-weighted category. Real NYC landlords use checks, ACH via property-management portals, or credit cards via Zillow / StreetEasy / Buildium. They don't use Western Union, gift cards, or cryptocurrency. Specific heuristics:

  • Cryptocurrency or gift-card payment mentions — weight 5. Sources: NYPD, FTC, NY DOS.
  • Wire-transfer / Western Union / MoneyGram requests — weight 5. Sources: NYPD, FTC, NY DOS.
  • Zelle / Venmo / Cash App for first month or security deposit — weight 3 (kept lower because some small private landlords legitimately use Zelle for monthly rent). Source: NY DOS, pattern observation.
  • Application fee above the $20 statutory cap — weight 4. Source: NY HSTPA.
  • Security deposit greater than one month — weight 4. Source: NY HSTPA.
  • "Pay to hold the unit" before lease signing — weight 4. Sources: NYPD, NY DOS, FTC.

Communication red flags

How the listing or its lister communicates often reveals scam intent independently of the payment ask:

  • "Out of country" / "deployed" landlord who can't show the unit — weight 4. Sources: NYPD, FTC.
  • Email-only contact (no phone, no in-person showing location) — weight 2 (kept low because many legitimate listings funnel contact through a web form). Sources: NYPD, pattern observation.
  • Religious framing of trust ("god-fearing landlord", "blessed by god") used as a substitute for contractual reassurance — weight 3. Pattern observation.
  • Urgency pressure ("must decide today", "send the deposit now") — weight 3. Sources: NY DOS, FTC.
  • Explicit refusal of an in-person showing — weight 4. Sources: NYPD, StreetEasy, FTC.

Listing-content red flags

The price and content of the listing itself sometimes give it away:

  • Below-market rent: asking rent less than 60% of the neighborhood's median 1-bedroom rent — weight 3. The 60% floor is intentionally conservative so ordinary good deals don't fire. Sources: StreetEasy, NYPD, FTC.
  • No specific address or cross-streets despite naming a borough or neighborhood — weight 2 (kept low because privacy-conscious sellers withhold exact addresses). Source: StreetEasy.
  • Price-context mismatch: the listing's luxury adjectives ("luxury", "doorman", "Manhattan high-rise") imply a rent tier that's incompatible with the actual ask — weight 4. Source: StreetEasy.

(A "listing-text-anomalies" heuristic — machine-translated grammar patterns — was researched and intentionally cut from v1 because the false-positive rate is too high. Legitimate landlords often write quickly or in non-native English; flagging on grammar alone would produce too many bad calls.)

Process red flags

How the lister proposes to actually transfer keys and paperwork:

  • Promises to mail / FedEx / courier the keys without an in-person meeting — weight 5. Source: NYPD (the "false set of keys" pattern).
  • Invokes an unfamiliar escrow service or "trust agreement" — weight 4. Sources: NYPD, FTC.
  • Asks for SSN or bank account number before an in-person viewing — weight 4. Sources: NY DOS, FTC.

How the score is calibrated

Each heuristic has an integer weight from 1 to 5. The total score is the sum of weights for triggered heuristics. The thresholds are:

  • 0-2 points: low risk. Probably nothing to worry about, but always verify in person.
  • 3-7 points: medium risk. Multiple borderline signals; treat as suspicious and verify thoroughly before any money or personal information changes hands.
  • 8+ points: high risk. Multiple high-confidence scam indicators. We recommend not engaging with this listing.

The key design choice: no single false positive can push a listing into the "high risk" band on its own. The maximum weight is 5, and the "high risk" threshold is 8. That's deliberate — we require at least two corroborating signals to call something high-risk, so that a single confused weight (or a single quirky-but-legitimate listing) can't produce a false alarm.

The high-weight (5) signals (crypto, wire transfer, mail-the- keys) all individually trigger a "medium" verdict. They become "high" only when paired with anything else. This is the right calibration for a tool people might actually act on — the cost of a false "high" (telling someone a real listing is a scam) is large, so we make it require corroboration.

What this tool does NOT do

  • It does not verify addresses.We can't tell you a real apartment exists at 123 Main St; we can only tell you that the listing's text matches or doesn't match common scam patterns.
  • It does not check broker licensure. NY DOS publishes a broker license lookup; for high-value transactions, verify the broker there directly.
  • It does not check images.Reverse image-search is one of the most effective scam-detection tools (scammers reuse photos from other listings) but it's outside the text-only scope of this tool. Use Google Images' reverse-search on the listing's photos separately.
  • It does not store anything. The pasted listing text runs entirely in your browser. We have no record of any listing anyone has checked, by design.
  • It does not replace seeing the apartment in person. No textual analysis substitutes for in-person verification of the unit, the building, and the person handing over the keys.

Re-verification schedule

  • FARE Act and statutory cap references — re-verified annually each January or whenever NYC DCWP / NY state publishes a relevant statutory update.
  • NYPD, FTC, NY DOS scam guidance pages — re-checked annually for new red flag patterns or language changes.
  • StreetEasy scam blog— re-checked annually; their nine-section guide is the most actively maintained NYC-specific reference.
  • Below-market thresholds— tied to quarterly neighborhood-rent updates (see the rents methodology page); the 60% floor is structural but the per-neighborhood median values move quarterly.

See the scam check tool to paste a listing and run it through the catalog, or read our guide on scam listing patterns for the non-technical explainer.