Victims Claim Renting Scam

Seven new alleged victims have stepped forward in a real estate scam in which a former Harvard Extension School student has been accused of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from more than a dozen victims.

Since The Crimson first wrote about 23-year-old Linda G. Vaghar’s arrest on Jan. 12, the number of alleged victims involved has doubled, and some have reported that Vaghar continued corresponding with those victims even weeks after The Crimson reported her arrest.

Vaghar’s alleged scam involved listing her Cambridge apartment for rent on Craigslist.org, convincing interested renters to pay her the first and last month’s rent, and then at the last minute making up sob stories to back out of the deal. The scam left victims struggling for months with a trail of excuses and bad checks in an effort to recuperate their money.

Vaghar—who, according to friends at Harvard, frequented finals clubs and the undergraduate social scene—is no longer enrolled at the Extension School, according to Dean of Students and Alumni Affairs at Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education Christopher S. Queen.

“We are following her court case closely,” Queen wrote in an e-mail.

Vaghar was arrested on Jan. 7 and has been charged with at least two counts of larceny, each of which carries a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison. Her pre-trial hearing is scheduled for Feb. 18.

Vaghar could not be reached for comment for this story.

Police reports and interviews with victims suggest that Vaghar’s plot was more extensive than The Crimson first reported on Jan. 12, and that she frequently changed her persona and story.

To Roger Cheng, a third-year student at Harvard Medical School (HMS), Vaghar was an intern at a local law firm offering her apartment for cheap because she was headed to Yale for a joint JD-MBA program. To Theo Vanderzee, a 26-year-old consultant, she was a paralegal from Brooklyn going to New York University Law School next year. And to others, she was an undergraduate at the College.

Vaghar would offer an apartment for as low as $300 a month to several people at the same time. She told three people that they were each moving in to the same apartment on Nov. 1, and three that they were moving in at the beginning of December—all of whom had already sent her checks for $900 to $1,500, they said.

As the move-in date approached, victims said Vaghar would craft a story explaining why she wouldn’t be able to let them lease the apartment.

Fadi Skieker, a student at Emerson College, said Vaghar told her that her mother was sick and her father was dead; Vanderzee said that he was also told that her father had died. And one woman affiliated with HMS, who wished to remain anonymous, said that Vaghar told her that her father had Parkinson’s Disease.

But, the HMS affiliate wrote in an e-mail, she later “met with [Vaghar’s] brother, mother, and spoke with her father on the phone, the entire family is alive and out of the hospital.”

In the ensuing struggle to get back their money, some victims said they have been paid back, but most said they have yet to be repaid in full.

Evidence recorded in police reports also suggests that Vaghar may have confused which story she had given to each prospective renter.

According to a police report, one victim, Fifi Ngin, had paid Vaghar $1,200 to rent her apartment for $400 a month.

But when Ngin asked for her money back after Vaghar terminated the contract, Vaghar sent her a check for $1,500—$300 more than she was owed.

However, as most victims said was also the case for them, when Ngin went to cash the $1,500 check, she was informed that it drew from a closed bank account.

Several victims also told The Crimson that Vaghar continued to make up stories and promise them reimbursements even after the Jan. 12 article.

Kevin S. Mbugua, a student at Berklee College of Music, said that he was still corresponding with Vaghar in an attempt to recover the $800 she owed him weeks after the article was published, until he Googled her name and found the Crimson article and related weblog postings.

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.org, said that plots like the one Vaghar is accused of are not very common on his site but that he often gets personally involved when similar situations arise.

“This is an old scam, not very common on our site, maybe our active participation is the reason,” Newmark wrote in an e-mail.

While the exact structure of the alleged scam could not be confirmed, interviews suggested that most of the earlier victims of the plot, who first responded to the posting in July and planned to move in at the end of the summer, have been paid back, while many of the later victims have yet to be repaid in full, and some have not yet received any of their money.

But many of the people involved in her case also said they were confused about how Vaghar expected to get away with her plot. She used real information about her address and phone number—even in some cases providing her social security number—and had friends in common with some of her victims.

“It’s almost like Linda doesn’t have a fear about anything,” said Mbugua. “She didn’t have a fear about getting caught, used her real name, her picture’s on thefacebook.com. It doesn’t look like she tried to protect herself at all.”

—Staff writer Reed B. Rayman can be reached at rrayman@fas.harvard.edu.