Introducing Homito StaySafeAI – our journey from crisis to innovation

The problem

Desperate landlords became easy targets for organised crime. Scammers crafted false identities, manipulated anxious property owners, secured lease contracts and then sub-let the same apartments 20-30 times to tenants who were under massive pressure to find housing. These tenants paid in advance deposits, reservation fees, months of rent to fraudsters using one identity after another. On a single unit, scammers could extract USD 25 000–50 000 before disappearing, while authorities and property owners remained unaware of the full picture.

Although my own brokerage business had for some time conducted background checks and flagged suspicious tenants, one day I became a victim. If it could happen to me, someone who believed I knew the market inside out. It could happen to anyone.

As I dug deeper, I discovered that the rental fraud wasn’t isolated. The network of criminal activity extended across industries: social insurance, employment agencies, corporate registries, banking systems, all used for money laundering, safe-houses, and other illicit purposes. The heavy-hitting perpetrators consistently escaped because the links between sectors were hard to trace.

Later, police confirmed what I had uncovered: the rental market fraud was not simply opportunistic, but part of heavy organised crime, with ripple effects into banking, insurance, public procurement and beyond.