HARLEM — A woman posing as a realtor scammed $22,800 from at least five victims looking for apartments in Harlem’s red-hot real estate market.
Koudedja Diawara, 55, has been arrested twice since March for promising Harlem rentals and accepting rent payments but not delivering on the pad, according to the criminal complaint.
Exactly one week after being arrested for grand larceny on March 18, Diawara collected $1,500 from a man who thought he was paying his first month’s rent, prosecutors charge.
The phony realtor was arrested Thursday and hit with four more counts of grand larceny. Between July 2014 and May 2015, she is suspected of collecting between $4,000 and $5,000 from her victims for a total of $22,800, records show.
Her lawyer did not reply to an inquiry about the case.
Police believe she was targeting members of the neighborhood's African community.
People in West Harlem’s Senegalese community said the only rare thing about Diawara’s case is that she has been arrested.
The Senegalese Community Center on West 116th Street receives about 100 of these cases a year but only about one in 10 get reported to the authorities, according to general manager Kaaw Sow.
“They are not only targeting West African immigrants, they are targeting undocumented West African immigrants,” he said. “People are desperate and so afraid to report, that is why they are easy victims.”
The most recent incident for the Senegalese Community Center was Friday when a married couple reported that they paid $1,700 for an apartment to a woman who went by the name “Mary,” Sow said.
Undocumented immigrants are particularly at risk because they don’t have an established credit history and therefore feel excluded from renting an apartment through legitimate channels, he said. Many of the scammers are also members of West African community, he added.
“What they do is they have a deal with the super,” Sow said. “When someone moves out they show them the apartment.”
Diawara’s case is the first time Sow has ever heard of someone being arrested for this type of scam.
She is being held at Rikers Island on $40,000 bail, records show.
