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.
messi ricks on 12 Dec 13The Bank of England plans to cut its support for mortgage lending in the U.K. and nudge banks towards lending more to small businesses, it said Thursday, November 28. The move is an answer to increasing concern that a speedy pickup in housing market activity in Britain could ultimately turn unpleasant, affecting banks and borrowers, and also as longstanding worries that small firms are being starved of credit, hindering economic recovery. What's more, it is a sample of the growing willingness of central banks across the globe to organize customized policies to maneuver their economies, rather than relying exclusively on official interest. The BOE said in its twice-yearly financial stability report that although there is little evidence that quickening activity in Britain's housing market poses an immediate threat to financial stability, "risks may grow if stronger activity is accompanied by further substantial and rapid increases in house prices and a further buildup in household indebtedness." The central bank said property has played "a central role" in many previous economic and financial crises. In the U.K., real estate accounts for 70% of non-financial assets. House prices in the U.K. have climbed speedily in past months, formed worries over the materialization of a new bubble in prices. A government mortgage-support program for would-be homebuyers called Help-to-Buy had pave the way for a boost in mortgage lending, together with an increase in the number of riskier loans on offer that entail merely a small down payment. The BOE said that in response to the pickup in housing-market activity and an ongoing dearth in small-business lending it has decided to overhaul its flagship Funding-for-Lending Scheme, or FLS, which offers banks cheap cash provided they use it to dish out loans to households and businesses. Banks drawing on the FLS will from January no longer benefit from reduced capital requirements on new mortgage lo
