About FlagMyListing

FlagMyListing is a free tool that helps renters identify potentially fraudulent rental listings before they send money or personal information to a scammer.

Who Runs This Site

FlagMyListing is an independent project built and maintained by one developer. It is not a company, a registered charity, or a government service, and it is not affiliated with any rental platform, letting agent, landlord association, or property management company.

Being small is deliberate, but it has consequences worth stating plainly: there is no support team, no call centre, and no ability to intervene in a dispute on your behalf. What this site can do is read a listing and tell you which known fraud patterns it matches, so you can make a better-informed decision before any money moves.

Why This Exists

Rental fraud is unusually well documented and unusually badly served by tooling. The FTC recorded roughly 65,000 rental scam reports and about $65 million in reported losses between January 2020 and June 2025, with a median loss of $1,000 — and because most fraud is never reported to any agency, that figure represents a fraction of the real harm.

Despite that, when someone is looking at a suspicious listing at 11pm and wondering whether the “landlord” asking for a holding deposit is real, there is very little between them and the decision. Advice articles exist, but they require you to already suspect something is wrong. This site tries to be the thing you can paste a listing into.

How the Checker Works

The risk analysis runs against a library of scam patterns compiled from FTC reports, BBB Scam Tracker data, consumer protection guidance, and published research on housing fraud. It also compares the advertised price against local rent averages for cities across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, because pricing well below the local median is one of the most reliable lures scammers use.

Text you paste is analysed entirely in your browser and is never sent to our server. When you submit a listing link, our server — or, for sites that block automated access, a free third-party reader service — temporarily retrieves that public page so its contents can be read, then the analysis runs in your browser; the retrieved content is not retained after processing. Standard technical logs may record limited request metadata (such as time and response status), but not the listing content you check.

The scoring rules are published in full on our methodology page, including what each signal weighs and where the thresholds come from. If you think a rule is wrong, the reasoning is there to argue with.

What This Site Is Not

  • It is not a guarantee in either direction. A clean result does not mean a listing is genuine, and a flagged result does not prove fraud. No automated tool replaces verifying a property and a landlord independently.
  • It does not provide legal or financial advice. If you believe you have been scammed, contact your bank immediately and report it to the relevant authority for your country.
  • It cannot verify identity or ownership. It reads the text of a listing. It has no access to land registries, tenancy deposit schemes, or agent licensing databases.
  • It is not affiliated with any rental platform, and platforms have no involvement in or influence over its results.

How This Site Is Funded

FlagMyListing is free to use, with no account required and no limit on checks. It is funded by display advertising and by one paid product: a Deposit Recovery Kit for UK renters who have already lost money.

We do not run affiliate links, and we are not paid by any identity protection service, letting agent, or rental platform. Where this site recommends an external service or resource, it is because it is genuinely relevant — nobody has paid for the placement, and we earn nothing if you use it. Advertising is served by Google and does not influence scam detection results, which are produced by published rules that make no reference to any advertiser.

Corrections

If you find an error — a wrong rent average, a broken reporting link, an outdated statute reference, or a listing the checker got badly wrong — please report it. Corrections are made promptly and the underlying rules are updated when a pattern turns out to be unreliable.

Contact

If you have questions, corrections, suggestions, or want to report a new scam pattern:

  • General enquiries: hello@flagmylisting.com
  • Corrections and errors: hello@flagmylisting.com
  • Privacy questions: privacy@flagmylisting.com

This is a one-person project, so replies are not instant, but every message is read.

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