Tenant swindled landlord who trusted her out of $20K unpaid rent and fled—tech-savvy landlord outsmarted her with clever move
Sometimes, people have to take a firm stand against wrongdoing to ensure that nobody else has to face it. One landlord rented out their apartment to a woman who stopped paying the rent after seven months during her one-year lease. She had also caused significant damage to the place. The tenant then went back to Australia to get away from the court case and from paying the $20,000 she was supposed to pay. However, the landlord was determined to ensure that the woman wouldn't be able to cheat anyone else, per a Reddit post by u/Buddhany.
The landlord owned an apartment in New York and decided to furnish it and rent it out, as they moved back with their mother to take care of her. The person was going to become a full-time caregiver, hence the rent was supposed to be their main source of income. "My new tenant, a middle-aged woman from Queensland, Australia, lacked previous landlord references since she said she had owned and lived in her home for 30 years." But as the tenant was "gainfully employed," met the financial criteria and had good references, the landlord agreed to sign a one-year lease with her. "Long story short, she stopped paying the rent 7 months into her 1-year lease."
The landlord tried to contact the woman throughout the ordeal, but it was in vain. Eventually, they were forced to take her to housing court and get her evicted from the apartment. The person also sued the tenant for the unpaid rent and the damage she had caused to the property. But the woman didn't attend the court hearings and went back to Australia. "It would be very expensive for me to remotely hire a local lawyer to domesticate the financial judgments and garnish her wages." But the landlord was determined to make the woman pay for the damage she had done and ensure that she wouldn't be able to do that to anyone else. "She has a very unique name, so I bought her domain name and built a website."
Then they proceeded to upload all the details of the case on that website, as well as the fact that the woman owes them over $20,000. The person also uploaded the condition she left the apartment in. There were details on where the woman worked and where she went to play bridge, too. "I focused on the SEO of the website and managed to have the website be the #1 result when you Google her name." Many people, including the woman's employer, saw the website and the landlord informed her references about her behavior. The person has had the website for three years now. "Although keeping the website going is costing me some money, the satisfaction of knowing that she has been publicly unmasked and can’t swindle others continues to give me great satisfaction." Any job, apartment, or social relationship would know about what the woman did.
People applauded the person for not letting the woman walk away unscathed in the comments section of the post. u/OrangeBug74 wrote, "The website will also have an effect on any expert witness work she may try to get back in the States. After a nice, long deposition, the opposing side would offer this as a lack of credibility and respect for US jurisprudence. This is indeed more expensive than $20,000 if she had previously been accepted as an expert witness in the US Federal Courts." u/Objective-Tailor-561 commented, "This is the very best revenge outcome I have ever heard of. And you served it cold and aged perfectly." u/thecraicislist remarked, "You should reach out to local radio stations in Queensland, they will love talking about a story like this and it will spread like wildfire around there on social media."