London, home to the rich, the famous, the useless, the meek, the poor, the comical, the brave, the homeless and frankly, more useless people. In total, you have around 8 million meat bags making their way home within the M25 night after night after working 9 to 5 at financial institutions such as Woolworths, McDonalds and selling the Big Issue.

But some at least do go to a home of some description, be it the luxury flat above, or as most are forced to do, share with 12 Albanians and a transvestite.

You see, a fair while ago it was confirmed that London has some of the most expensive property in the world. If you wish to live in the city you basically have to be prepared to pay around £275,000 for studio flat in Soho, and remember that’s just one room with a bucket in the corner for you to relive yourself.

Even when the price dropped by £20,000 last month given the state of the economy here in broken Britain, you know you will always pay a premium.

Renting pricing has gone up by 8% in recent times, owing to the fact that you can buy a hotdog easily in the capital, but it makes for a lousy 2 bed detached, people are just consigned to the fact there is no affordable housing, no you can’t count the part buy, part rent, you end up just as broke and you have even less of the property.

Times are tough. And therefore when you trawl through the likes of Gumtree.com trying to find a nice place to live around the devil’s armpit, you will come across adverts that will catch your eye quicker than you catch a naughty disease from someone who was friendly.

Here was what the criteria at the time of the search:

1 Bed room flat – Anywhere you won’t get stabbed.

Granted this wasn’t likely to yield any great results, and it would mean another night trawling through the bins at Aldi, just looking for that nice extension to the living room. But wait, what’s this?

Not one but two adverts for one bedroom apartments in wait for it, the center of London?!?! All bills included as well? Hmm…

Using the Gumtree email dookickey, I contacted both of the individuals to find out what the story was:

One landlord was a Dr. Michael Silloway, who was a M.B., B.A.O., B.Ch. D.O.R.C.P.I. M.R.C.G.P. MTTS, RAC, B.Y.O.B. and well, what the hell, let’s throw in every letter of the alphabet in for good measure. The other was someone either a boy or a girl or a strange mixture of the two, Oliva something, you may think it’s a girl, but there were no objections when I repeated typed sir in the email correspondence.

Naming these people on the Internet is quite a thing to do, this laying the way for potential trouble, however I’m convinced I will not suffer any ill effects as a result of naming them and there is a reason why:

Both were scams.

QUICK! HIDE THE TINY PEOPLE! AGHHHHHHHHHH! But wait, hold your horses, the bad people didn’t get anything, except for 5 minutes of my time, and this experience is one which is best shared.

Therefore in conjunction with one of children television’s best loved productions, Ooh Sometimes presents:

Now of course, you’re going to want to know how do they try it on with you? Here’s how it all goes:

• First you email them asking about the flat, having had an orgasm at such a possibility of affordable rent in the center of town.

• They then respond telling you about how much it costs, and ask about your intentions. They also tell you at this point that they don’t have to rent the place out, but after speaking to an imaginary friend, it would better to let the place out and have someone look after it.

• You then respond with how long you hope to have the place for and a bit about yourself. At this point, you will not reveal you intend to use the flat as a brothel.

• They then tell you that they have wasted quite a bit of money coming down from magicland or wherever they are and require proof you have the money BEFORE you even see the place. And remarkably proof of income is not allowed.

• You wonder what else you could do, so you ask.

• They get into touch with their army of lawyers (even the engineer in Leeds had one, amazing) and then suggest that you do a Western union transfer to someone you know and then transfer the money back to yourself and then forward them the slips.

• You then get suspicious.

After speaking with people in the know, and even the fraud officer at Western Union to see what their angle would be, it turns out this is all a way to scam money from either you or Western Union (if they are lucky, you will do over both)

One again, something in the city which looks too good to be true, is. Even just a simple task of finding somewhere you can actually stand coming home to on a nightly basis is made more difficult by persons unknown hoping to make a quick buck from someone who just arrived in a sense.

An Ooh Sometimes top tip appears to be: suspect everything and everyone.