Today I received a text, looked at it, and it was a lead from REDFIN. I'm a Realtor with Diverse Realty in Sacramento.

The message is asking me to pay $10 for the lead with a variety of systems such as Paypal and credit cards. That way I could see the full name, phone number, and address of said lead.

Some people are reporting receiving Realtor.com scams which look exactly the same. So beware!

There is a picture of the webs page. You may receive the link in an email or a text message. Following the link gives you that image. If you are not with the Realtor.com lead program, it's definitely crap. Realtor.com is NOT going to send you any leads in an uninvited manner. They will try to get your business, though.

The REDFIN scam is the same thing. REDFIN also offers leads to its agents, but you have to be a REDFIN agent before you can join their lead program.

There is a picture of the REDFIN website scam, so that way it looks exactly how I see it.

As we can see, the lead is not only going to include a phone number and an email address, it is said to be pre-qualified and I'm in Sacramento and the address is correct (that is, it's someone in the area.)

The message is very close, in content, to what someone would receive from Realtor.com or REDFIN. I'd bet that Keller Williams and Coldwell Banker, Berkshire Hathaway, and Remaxx, well, all the big ones, have exactly the same sort of thing. Oh, and especially the eXp Realty company which is very big in offering everything Internet.

So if you are with those companies, you obviously wold receive a lead with all the information, not one where you have to pay 10 bucks to get access to the data! (i.e. you somehow already paid to get this data.)

I certainly hope that as an agent you will search the Internet about that incredible lead (so incredible, it's like too good to be true) and find a page that talks about this scam. The fact is that it's not real. They'll get your cash, they may even send you the complete info from someone who has never mentioned the idea of becoming a home owner and is likely to hang up on you as soon as you start talking... but you know that once in a while a so called lead will do that anyway, so maybe that one was not that good afterall.

Notice how the email was carefully crafted including a copyright, having Terms of Use and Privacy Policy links (the links work, and they even send me to the real REDFIN Terms of Use and Privacy Policy pages! So they definitely look real—only they probably don't have anything about how they would send emails to random people and since these policies are pages long, you probably won't read them...)

The message also includes the correct address. The 1099 Steward St is the address of REDFIN's head quarters in Washington state.

And at the top you have a lead identifier and a date.

The whole thing really looks like a professional has done it. So it's a pretty sofisticated scam. At $10 a pop, it's not much, but if these guys are able to hit thousands of agents every day, it could still add up nicely. Who wouldn't want a pre-qualified ready to buy lead?! (even if you define yourself as a listing agent.)

Just in case, I made a search with that name on Facebook. The name Greg Humphrey returned someone, but infortunately for the scammer, that's also a Realtor with Coldwell Banker. (Oops!) So in my case, not too worry about too much. But many people do a little research like that, so scammer are not unlikely to use real information from Facebook to create their scam now a day! It's so easy to do, after all. Only if automated, you can end up with the wrong dude as we can see in my case. The other results did not match my area (Sacramento.)

Just remember, first you have to have an account with one of those companies before they send you leads. Second, they are not going to ask you to pay extra for each lead. Third, if they are trying to get you on the program, they would not send you a teaser lead. They would instead send you a bill because those programs you have to pay upfront in most cases and not just one lead. Also, most of the large companies will have a way to log in their website to check out your leads. So if you wonder whether this is one of yours, go to your account instead of wasting your money on some random scammer.