Tenant moved in and left in 3 days and filed for fraud with credit card

[Urvesh Patel]

Hi

I am new to being a landlord and the first 4 unit home I purchased resulted in a few things you don't wish to begin your journey!

1. I had a vacancy from a tenant moving out and the tenant who moved out didn't pay last month's rent and property manager was not good at handling this. The tenant made a mess and costed me a fortune to fix the entire unit and do severe pest control. 

2. I spent a good amount to redo the unit and put it on market and I found a new tenant who looked good on paper with no evictions, clear background (except for 1 record from 2004 due to possession of 30 grams marijuana which is now legalized). The tenant paid security deposit and rent before time and everything looked good again. The timeline is August 1 2023 when this happened

3. On August 4, the tenant stated they were involved in a shooting and got injured and provided all evidence supporting this claim. 

4. On August 19, the tenant mentioned they are paralyzed and asked if they could terminate lease. I honored this request.

5. On September 1 they filed a fraud on rental payment and the credit or debit card starts investigating the claim

6. On October 7, my property manager states we lost the dispute and now I am left with no rent payments and a chaos due to the oversight of property management in taking payment from credit card and possibly from a card that didn;t belong to tenant.

I wanted to ask how should I pursue this? My property manager said they will waive 1 month fees and marketing fees because of this but I am really pissed at the whole situation and am not sure how to handle this

[Jason Allen]

Quote from @Urvesh Patel:

Hi

I am new to being a landlord and the first 4 unit home I purchased resulted in a few things you don't wish to begin your journey!

1. I had a vacancy from a tenant moving out and the tenant who moved out didn't pay last month's rent and property manager was not good at handling this. The tenant made a mess and costed me a fortune to fix the entire unit and do severe pest control. 

2. I spent a good amount to redo the unit and put it on market and I found a new tenant who looked good on paper with no evictions, clear background (except for 1 record from 2004 due to possession of 30 grams marijuana which is now legalized). The tenant paid security deposit and rent before time and everything looked good again. The timeline is August 1 2023 when this happened

3. On August 4, the tenant stated they were involved in a shooting and got injured and provided all evidence supporting this claim. 

4. On August 19, the tenant mentioned they are paralyzed and asked if they could terminate lease. I honored this request.

5. On September 1 they filed a fraud on rental payment and the credit or debit card starts investigating the claim

6. On October 7, my property manager states we lost the dispute and now I am left with no rent payments and a chaos due to the oversight of property management in taking payment from credit card and possibly from a card that didn;t belong to tenant.

I wanted to ask how should I pursue this? My property manager said they will waive 1 month fees and marketing fees because of this but I am really pissed at the whole situation and am not sure how to handle this

You need to do 2 things: 
1) If you are 100% sure that they used a stolen credit card, you need to go to the police. You will probably need cooperation from the PM to find this out and get the information to make a report for fraud, and the police may not do anything beyond taking the police report, but if your original tenant was a scammer, they are going to scam again, and the police report with the scammer's name on it, even if it not prosecuted, will make it much more likely that the next time the scammer does it (and they WILL), they will be prosecuted. 

2. You need to start looking for a new PM.  Don't actually fire them until you have gotten any info etc. from your old PM that you need, and you have found a new PM that you have a properly vetted. You may also need to check your contract with the PM... really bad PM companies make it difficult to get out of their contracts (I wonder why... ).