Print edition: 
An Internet residential real estate scam that resurfaced in Wichita has grown out of control, local brokers say.
The city's chief real estate advocate nearly was victimized by it.
"It's more than a little frustrating," said Tessa Hultz, the new chief executive of the Wichita Area Association of Realtors. "Law enforcement can't do a lot about it because there's evidence to suggest that the people responsible aren't even here. They're overseas."
Known as the "Craigslist Scam," it works like this: The scammers lift a Wichita home sales listing from the Internet, and use Internet tax records to identify its seller.
After creating a Yahoo e-mail account with the seller's name, the home — usually an upscale house with a substantial price tag — is offered for rent on Craigslist for somewhere between $800 and $945, a relative bargain in the Wichita market.
All the prospective renter has to do to land the property is wire $500 to the scammers.
Hultz said she's run across more than 50 incidents of the Craigslist scam in her eight months in town.
The bogus listings nearly caught her as she looked for a Wichita rental late last year as she prepared to move her family from St. Louis.
"You know, I use Craigslist," she said. "And back then, we wanted to rent for a while while we looked for a new home.
"And every single thing I'd come up with in Wichita I'd get the same answer: That listing is not for rent. I've never seen anything like it before."
Wichita residential agent Murray Anderson, with J.P. Weigand & Sons, said Wednesday the scammers are persistent.
"I guess you can say I've only had one, but Craigslist keeps taking it down and they keep trying to relist it," Anderson said.
"They're relentless. It makes me wish I was in the rental business because if you have a half-million-dollar house in this town, you could rent that thing every day of the week for $800 a month," Anderson said, chuckling.
Anderson provided an e-mail from the scammer's Yahoo e-mail account, dated June 24.
In it, the scammer relates the stock story offered to prospective victims: He and his family are moving to West Africa after winning a bid for petroleum land.
The scammer wants to keep the house, he claims in broken English, and wants to rent it without paying a real estate professional middleman.
He asks for a $500 security deposit wire.
And about that pesky for-sale sign in the front yard, the scammer advises, "I will not want you to worry your self about it because we are not selling the house anymore and also do not contact any information you see in it because we are not dealing with any agent or third party again that is why we are looking for a caring tenant by our self."
The scam first resurfaced in Wichita last August, an offer almost identical to the ones Hultz identified.
Hultz said she's attempted to get local law enforcement involved in the issue, but because the perpetrators are likely not in Wichita, there's little that can be done.
Sharon Werner, chief of the division of consumer fraud and economic crime in the Sedgwick County District Attorney's Office, didn't return calls seeking comment.
The bottom line for prospective Craigslist renters is simple, Anderson said:
"If it seems too good to be true, it probably is."
