An Irish student has warned her fellow J1 travelers (those on summer working visas) to beware of a rental scam in the US that cost her and her friends almost $5,000. Leah Hughes (21), from Clonskeagh in Dublin, had been planning the trip of a lifetime - a summer in Los Angeles with four of her friends. The group wired $4,750 to a man claiming to own a property in Santa Monica on a reputable rental website, but he pocketed the money and left them with nothing. Leah, a journalism student from Dublin Business School, said: "Half of our accommodation money is gone. We've lost 750 euro each, which is half of what we were able to spend so we've decided we don't want to go to LA. I don't want to even think that I'm living in the same area as this guy who did this. “But we still want to go because we've paid for our flights and for our J1 visa but we're going to go to San Francisco instead. We don't have a house yet to stay in because we haven't been able to find anywhere that we can afford." Unfortunately, this kind of scam which cost Leah and her friends is common in the US. Celine Kennelly of the Irish Immigration and Pastoral Center in San Francisco said, "Our advice is, if someone asks you to wire money ahead of arriving here, don't do it. We've had this situation before and many students get scammed this way every year. We want to get the message out there to people that wiring money over to someone you don't know just isn't safe." Instead, students are urged to find a cheap hostel for the first few nights in their city of choice and use that as a base to look for accommodation when they arrive.
anastasia carmen on 22 Jul 12LA CRESCENTA, Calif. (KABC) - More than two dozen people say they fell victim to a costly home loan scam that targeted Korean immigrants. The lawyer accused of orchestrating it all is being sued. It took a life savings to buy this La Crescenta home. Losing it took mere months, all because of accused lawyer Timothy D. Thurman and Trinity Law Associates. Ok Kee Shin is just one of 28 alleged victims. "It is just such a shock, and that the house had been sold and foreclosed," said Shin through a translator. In a lawsuit, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center details a web of fraud. Though the plaintiffs are all Korean immigrants, people of any nationality could fall for this one. The suit says Trinity Law Firm hired Koreans to place ads, then illegally paid them, like bounty hunters, to bring in customers. "This practice known as 'running and capping' is against the law," said Yungsuhn Park, Asian Pacific American Legal Center. "Attorneys are prohibited from paying non-attorney agents to find clients." Everything seemed so credible. The Trinity Law Firm operated out of a high-rise on Wilshire Boulevard. "So he flipped through my loan documents and he told me that this was a bank that had a lot of errors in their loan documents," said Shin's translator, quoting her. She says Thurman assured her he could fix her loan for a fee of $7,000, and that she should stop paying her mortgage and ignore the foreclosure notices. Legal advocates now spread a warning: Avoid any person who offers guarantees to stop a foreclosure. Don't pay up-front fees: They are also illegal after a state law was passed last October. And seek help from a non-profit first. You don't need an attorney for loan modifications. As for Thurman, he was in trouble even before this suit. He pleaded guilty to forging the signature of a judge on a foreclosure document, a crime punishable by five years in prison - a penalty that comes too late to save former homeowners.
