Scam/SPAM Emails
As FranceHousehunt.com has become more and more popular and has risen through the ranks of the search engines to be on the first pages, the site has become a very attractive target for scammers and spammers.
We take scamming and spamming very seriously and make every effort to eliminate these types of emails from reaching our property advertisers.
We have introduced a new contact form on every listing that requires anyone enquiring about a property to input their email address twice and to also enter a code displayed in an image. This means it makes it much harder for automated spamming systems to send spam through our email system to property advertisers. Where-ever possible (i.e. if we can identify the source) we also report spam to the relevant authorities and/or ban the IP address from getting to our site.
If you are in doubt about an email, just forward it to us and we will look at it and let you know.
But please be aware that it is very difficult to stop the scammers from emailing advertisers - they are generally ‘real’ people who fill the contact form in manually. They will use an email address from one of the free providers such as Hotmail, G-Mail and the like. They will normally say they want to buy one of your houses (generally quite an expensive one) without even having seen it. The English they use won’t be very good. They will sometimes say they are buying the property for their ‘boss’. Generally the return address of the email will be different from the sending email address (not a good sign at all). So, if you get an enquiry that meets some or all of the criteria above exercise caution. When we do spot a scam email we attempt to identify the IP address it comes from and then ban that IP address from accessing the site.
