What are the most common ways fraudsters in Ukraine make money and how to protect their money?
In just four months of 2024, more than a thousand court sentences were handed down in Ukraine in cases related to fraud. More than a third of the 1,063 cases are related to fraud in the real estate market.
Real estate rental schemes
“In particular, we are talking about schemes using free housing search sites. So, only the OLX classifieds site is mentioned in the context of 363 criminal cases. Fraudsters actively use this resource, pretending to be sellers or lessors of real estate that does not actually exist,” – analysts note The opendatabase.
For example, one of the defendants managed to defraud 21 users by taking an advance payment for an apartment that does not exist. The attacker managed to “earn” 19,000 hryvnias. According to the court’s decision, the fraudster was sentenced to 5 years and 7 months of imprisonment.
“In 2023, the OLX Ukraine platform received more than 2 million complaints about suspicious ads. About 50% of ads with such complaints were deleted, among them 40% were blocked as those that intend to harm users of the service. It is worth noting that one ad can receive several complaints,” says Viktor Nobiuz, head of the OLX Ukraine business analytics department.
How to protect yourself from fraudsters?
In order not to fall prey to fraudsters, tenants are advised not to pay money in advance and to check the ownership rights of the landlord or seller of housing. If you haven’t seen the ownership documents, you can check them on the Opendatabot platform. For this, it is enough to simply know the individual tax number (TIN) of the person.
