A MUM who is desperately trying to find a home for her family claims she was nearly hoodwinked out of hundreds of pounds by a property scammer.

Julie Poulton, 38, is living in a rented house in Clacton with her husband and eight-year-old son, who is autistic, and two-year-old daughter.

The property has recently been put on the market by the owner, so the mother-of-six is now on searching for a new home.

After being disheartened by the number of listings she found which were otherwise out of the couple’s price range, she saw an advert for a two-bedroom house.

With the monthly rent for the Oxford Crescent property being £850, significantly less than she had been quoted elsewhere, Julie’s interest was piqued.

But after exchanging several messages with the so-called landlord of the home, she says she started to become suspicious.

Gazette:

“She said she was a nurse in Edinburgh so wanted to do everything over email, including the contract,” added Julie, who suffers from depression and anxiety. 

“She wanted £850 a month and but said she would need £300 of the £900 deposit before she could send me the keys.

“I went to look at the outside of the property and spoke to a lovely neighbour and I showed her the landlord, but she told me she had never seen her.

“A board was then put up on the house by an estate agents so I called them but they told me this person was not even the landlord.”

Since issuing a warning on social media, Julie has received responses from other people claiming they were targeted by scammers.

She added: “I think it is disgusting because she would have been happy to take money off me even though she knew our situation – it is horrible.

“I could have given her all this money and then tried to move into a property we genuinely wouldn’t have been able to move into – we would have been on the streets.

“It is heart-breaking because I actually thought we had found something in our family budget but now we are still just spinning around in circles.”