Anyone can put up a property listing and call themselves a letting agent. Here's how to verify the company behind the listing — using Companies House, address checks, and cross-referencing techniques that take ten minutes.
Rental fraud works because would-be tenants are under pressure: the market moves fast, properties get snapped up, and the fear of missing out is real. A fake agent exploits this by creating a sense of urgency with a legitimate-looking listing.
The listing often uses real photos (copied from a genuine listing or sale), a real address (the agent doesn't own or manage it), and a company name that sounds credible. The only way to spot the fraud is to check the company itself.
Before you pay any money, run these checks on the letting agent's company:
A letting agency incorporated last month with no trading history is worth investigating. Legitimate letting agents usually have years of filings, accounts, and a trading address. A brand-new company with a professional-looking website may be a shell.
What to look for: Check the incorporation date on Companies House. If it's recent, check whether the directors have a history of dissolved companies — use the director name search to see their full appointment history.
Many legitimate companies use virtual offices. But for a letting agent you're about to hand money to, it's worth asking: does this company have a physical presence anywhere?
What to look for: Search the address on Companies House. If it shows 300+ companies registered at the same address, it's almost certainly a formation agent or virtual office. Cross-reference with Google Maps — does the address look like a retail premises or an office block that could plausibly house a letting agent?
A director who has been involved with multiple dissolved companies — especially several dissolved in quick succession — is a pattern worth investigating. It doesn't prove fraud, but it does show a history of companies that didn't survive.
What to look for: Use the director search on Companies House. Look at every company they've been appointed to. Are most of them dissolved? Were they dissolved with outstanding debts? Check the Gazette notices for compulsory strike-off vs voluntary dissolution.
A dissolved or dormant company cannot legally trade. If the letting agent's company shows as anything other than "Active" on Companies House, the company can't be operating lawfully.
What to look for: The company status is shown on the Companies House overview page. "Active — proposal to strike off" means Companies House has started the dissolution process — often because accounts are overdue.
A real letting agency has a website with actual listings, a phone number, a complaints procedure, and usually membership of a redress scheme (The Property Ombudsman or Property Redress Scheme). By law, letting agents in England must belong to one of these schemes.
What to look for: Check the agent's website for a redress scheme logo and membership number. You can verify membership on the scheme's public register. No membership = operating illegally.
Look up the property address on other platforms — Rightmove, Zoopla, OpenRent. Does the same property appear under a different agent? Is the rent significantly different? A property listed at £1,200 by one agent and £900 by another is a signal to investigate further.
Check the Land Registry for the owner — available for £3 from HM Land Registry. If the claimed landlord doesn't match the registered owner, ask why.
Every letting agent in England must belong to one of two government-approved redress schemes:
Both have public registers. If the agent claims membership, verify the number. If they're not a member, they're trading illegally — and they can be fined up to £5,000.
A clean Companies House record doesn't guarantee the agent is legitimate — it's possible to run a fraudulent operation through a properly registered company. The checks reduce risk; they don't eliminate it.
What they do is surface the obvious fraud: the dissolved company, the banned director, the virtual address with 500 companies, the company registered two weeks ago. These are the cases that account for most rental deposit fraud — and they're visible to anyone who checks.