Avoid those who tell you to send funds before they will show you the property (one scammer tried this with one of my rentals when I pretended to be an interested applicant) or claim to live far away and will simply send you a key after you send the deposit without being able to view the property beforehand.If you are coming from another part of the country and cannot view the property beforehand (for example, you're in the military and are being restationed), see if you can have a fellow active duty person view it for you.As others have mentioned, many property records are now online so you can verify if dealing with a private owner you are actually dealing with the person who owns the property and not some scammer.Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads don't seem to have as many problems with scammers as Craigslist.Gail

They aren't the ones who are going to fight you on a foreclosure because most of them just bury their head in the sand and pretend it's not happening. 

Is there value in pretending I am interested in other properties?

Personally, I'll pretend I'm 80 years old and blame computers.  

Where you're ignorant is that you don't know the facts so let's just stop pretending that you have all of the answers for every market. 

Well, an agent should tell you"you'll have to check with permitting/zoning", as well as that what an attorney would say....neither will pretend to know all the particular zoning/building requirements.

So of course they put up a front and pretend nothing is wrong.

If you have $500k available, my advice would be to be pretend like you have $50k and make your next investment. 

@Michael HollingheadYou post that you are looking for a house in Alabama or Florida on an Internet message board,  wait 24 - 28 hours, and your inbox should be a flutter with wholesalers - both pros and cons.Next lesson - not all wholesalers will being you a better deal than you can find on MLS ... in fact, some will try to bring you properties off the MLS ... marked-up of course :-)Now, to be fair, there are excellent wholesalers out there who actually know how to properly analyse a deal and estimate rehab costs ... you just may have to wade through and trip over a lot of pretenders to find a diva.

They are clearly investors in business to make money, yet they pretend they do not want to make money to the seller.