I am a senior and lost $300 when I tried to rent a house in a small town in Vermont. Due to a health crisis, we decided we had to move near my daughter, as I am handicapped and can't drive, and was unable to take care of my husband, who was 68 and ill. When we couldn't find an apt. in a senior apartment complex for one to two years, we decided to put an ad on Craigslist. We were approached by a man who said he had a house to rent, and he was in England with his wife and children, and we could rent it until they got back to the states.

We wired this man the deposit, he was to over night us the keys and lease, which never came. We found out he was working out of a computer/coffee shop in the UK, and there were men from Nigeria having money wired to the UK via Western Union, and they were forwarding the money to Nigeria. Nigeria is the home of terrorist training camps, aka the underwear bomber from a couple of years ago.

I notified every local, state and federal agency, plus the American Embassy in the UK. No one took this serious, and even though I did get Craigslist to put warnings on their website, which may have slowed down the process a bit, I don't think it stopped it. I know first hand, that now management companies and landlords are doing credit checks for apartments. One can argue both sides of this issue, but when people are desperate, such as they are now with foreclosures, bad economy, excessive medical bills which we have, layoff's etc. there are millions who are looking for apartments. If you want to look at the number of seniors over 65 who have bad credit, because of medical bills, high cost of living, high number of medical bills they can't pay, and no cost of living increase for two years, I'm sure many of us don't have good credit any more. We have been denied apartments in subsidized low income senior apartments because of poor credit, even though the credit is out of our hands, and we can't correct our bad credit now, we can't afford food for the whole month. So I guess there won't be any attempts to pay down past credit card balances, when we don't have enough except a few cans of soup, that people donate to our senior complex once a month.

I am tried of being ripped off, and I'm really sick of people who are making up the rules for these management companies, who are getting rich off subsidized low income senior apartments. Now these people from Nigeria, are coming on line and robbing us, and when we complain no one listens, no one.