tracking down false rental files

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Her house in Pornic (Loire-Atlantique), Gisèle Le Maître, is very attached to it. “It’s a small house that I inherited from my parents. It’s barely 30 square meters,” she indicates. When it came time to rent it, she took care to choose her tenant carefully. “She tells me that she found permanent work. I leave with the work certificate and the two-month deposit check”says Gisèle Le Maître. Three weeks later, it’s a cold shower: the deposit check is rejected by his bank because it is not linked to any bank account. “There, I say to myself that it’s weird. It’s really not normal. So then, I ask her: what’s going on? She says to me: ‘but be patient, it will come, it’s a bit long, but I promise you, I’ll take her to you, there’s no problem'”she continues. She never paid him. The tenant leaves behind 6,000 euros in unpaid rent to which are added nearly 2,000 euros in lawyer fees.

Bad payers, in certain cases, go so far as to falsify their file. In recent years, false documents have become more and more common in rental files. In just a few clicks, it is possible to obtain tailor-made pay slips, for example. And on social networks, scammers go even further and offer turnkey files, all for several hundred euros.

In Lille (North), a company analyzes 500,000 documents per year. And in 7 out of 10 cases, at least one of them is falsified. Now, some tenants are even going so far as to create documents from scratch using artificial intelligence. This is the case with an identity card. “We know this because, whether at the level of the fonts or even at the level of the MRZ line, the two small lines which are at the bottom, there are inconsistencies. And then, the inlay of the photo does not conform to an identity document, we see that it is generated”explains Benjamin Kasprzak, Director of Meelo Operations, Finovox.

False documents have become very difficult to detect for owners who sometimes find themselves in a dead end. In Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle), a bailiff has just collected the keys to an apartment. Audrey Kob takes stock of the situation. The tenant left after two years without paying. The entire rental file was false. But once the lease was signed, the tenant was legally at home and recourse for owners is complicated and often very long. “Regardless of the fact that the person gave you false receipts or false certificates, it is a signed lease, so you are obliged to terminate it judiciously”explains Me Audrey Kob of the Kob & Didry firm.

Creating a false rental file is punishable by three years of imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros.