The New York Post: PRACTICALLY ZIP; E-MAIL REAL ESTATE SERVICE ACCUSED OF FRAUD

The New York Post
September 28, 2003, Sunday
HEADLINE: PRACTICALLY ZIP; E-MAIL REAL ESTATE SERVICE ACCUSED OF FRAUD
BYLINE: ANNE BECKER

Furious customers of apartment-listing service Practically Rented are saying the company is more like a practical joke.
The company solicited apartment-hunters through the popular craigslist.com, promising to send daily e-mails of New York apartment listings for an annual fee of $195 - all but $15 of which it claimed would be refundable if the hunter rented an apartment through other means.
Now, dozens of former customers have complained on web sites, to government agencies and the Better Business Bureau and say the e-mails were spotty, the apartments dingy and the company's representatives unreachable.
The ensuing squabble has dragged in major credit card companies, government agencies and the owner of craigslist.com, the popular online community.
At least six Practically Rented subscribers who found apartments elsewhere said they tried filing for the promised refund, only to find a computerized voice mail and no responses from a generic bookkeeping e-mail address.
The customers say instead of refunding the $195, Practically Rented charged their credit cards an additional $195 fee a few months later.
"When I heard the money-back guarantee, I assumed they were so good they could make money, but I immediately put my guard up," said environmental consultant Charlotte Matthews, who filed with the New York State Consumer Protection Board.
Three former employees of the company say the woman behind the mess is Alexandrea Stewart.
"Stewart is the source of the problem," said Maggie Ocampo, who said she left Practically Rented two months after Stewart hired her to manage an office for the company.
"She was always stressed out. She always had an excuse."
She has been villified on web sites as well, the subject of a bulletin board barrage of criticism.
Stewart, however, takes exception to that. "I have been scammed, taken advantage of and duped," she said.
The address under which Practically Rented was licensed - a suite at the Chelsea Hotel - matches the one Stewart has used to register a Web site for Albannach Entertainment, which recently posted a casting call on the Internet for a "mockumentary" on New York real estate.
According to Stewart, Practically Rented is seeking to sue Visa and Mastercard, whom she said froze 70 percent of the company's assets to grant customers' refunds, forcing her to take out $10,000 in personal loans.
Stewart said she lost her brokers' license seven years prior to her involvement with Practically Rented.
She pointed to Craig Newmark, owner of craigslist.com, as an owner of the company.
Newmark denied owning the company and said his involvment was limited to removing defamatory posts from his Web site.
"There are many brokers who aren't completely ethical who do really wrong things and we're trying to do something about it," he said.
Practically Rented's Web site lists a Las Vegas address as its current location, but the business services office in that county has no record of a license for the company.
The New York Department of State has received several complaints against the company and is waiting for a statement from Stewart before referring the case to the attorney general, according to a representative.

nypost.com


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