how to steal an apartment
Apropos of nothing in particular:
So I was reading a fic yesterday (which I will not be naming or linking to, because it's relevant only as the spark of this ramble) in which (as a minor backstory point) two skilled hackers essentially steal an apartment by making it vanish off all electronic records so they won't have to pay rent.
Something struck me a little weird about that, but the sense of wrongness didn't crystallize until later on, when the hackers get into more serious crimes and one tells the other to stop bringing one-night stands back to where they have evidence lying around. Because they don't want to get found out.
The thing is, they would have been found out LONG before that. You flat out CANNOT make an apartment vanish that way. Not if the rental company/property management company is remotely on top of things.
Like, okay, you disappear an apartment off electronic records. You steal electricity and whatever other utilities you require. There are still people who know the unit is physically there. If the rental company keeps paper records, they REALLY know it's there. There are going to be paper floor plans and architectural diagrams floating around. And sooner or later somebody is going to notice that they don't have a lease or a tenant listed for Unit X, and also that Unit X has vanished from their electronic records, which is a big red flag that something fishy is going on. This will likely take one year maximum, given that apartments tend to rent on one-year leases (which then have to be manually extended/renewed each year).
Some buildings have regular preventative extermination treatments, and in those cases the exterminator will go to every unit; that doesn't rely on electronic records. The exterminator will have a master key and will see all your criminal paraphernalia, and if they're remotely competent will report that to the rental company or property management company. And if you change your lock so the master key won't work? That gets reported even faster.
You're also going to have trouble if there are general maintenance projects, like a burst water pipe or a problem with the heating pipes/vents. It doesn't matter how well you maintain your own apartment -- you can't control what other tenants do in their spaces, and believe me, somebody will break something major sooner or later. Then maintenance will have to notify the tenants that they're coming in to do Project Y, and if nobody has a record of the tenants in Unit X? That's a problem. If maintenance can't work the lock? That's a problem. And so on.
If you want to disappear a property, you're much better off with something you own in full rather than something you rent. And not a condo, either -- then you'd be stuck with the condo association, which is just as nosy as a rental company or property management company. You want a freestanding house. This of course means you'll have to fuck around with tax rolls, and probably intercept tax assessments now and then, but that's much less of an ongoing problem than trying to Jedi mind trick a whole rental company.
But really, you don't want to make the apartment vanish. If you're going to steal an apartment, what you want to do is lease it as a perfectly normal tenant (possibly under a fake ID) and then pay your rent promptly and in full with money you've stolen from somewhere else. Much simpler and less stressful! And if you want to be all "yay computers!" about the thing, you can do leases entirely by email these days, and pay electronically; most rental companies are quite happy to facilitate that sort of thing.
...
I think too much about logistics sometimes.
Also, it's a lot easier to suspend disbelief over things I am unfamiliar with, as you can tell by the fact that I'm writing this post now instead of several years ago, when I first read the fic in question, but had not yet started working for a rental company. *wry*
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So I was reading a fic yesterday (which I will not be naming or linking to, because it's relevant only as the spark of this ramble) in which (as a minor backstory point) two skilled hackers essentially steal an apartment by making it vanish off all electronic records so they won't have to pay rent.
Something struck me a little weird about that, but the sense of wrongness didn't crystallize until later on, when the hackers get into more serious crimes and one tells the other to stop bringing one-night stands back to where they have evidence lying around. Because they don't want to get found out.
The thing is, they would have been found out LONG before that. You flat out CANNOT make an apartment vanish that way. Not if the rental company/property management company is remotely on top of things.
Like, okay, you disappear an apartment off electronic records. You steal electricity and whatever other utilities you require. There are still people who know the unit is physically there. If the rental company keeps paper records, they REALLY know it's there. There are going to be paper floor plans and architectural diagrams floating around. And sooner or later somebody is going to notice that they don't have a lease or a tenant listed for Unit X, and also that Unit X has vanished from their electronic records, which is a big red flag that something fishy is going on. This will likely take one year maximum, given that apartments tend to rent on one-year leases (which then have to be manually extended/renewed each year).
Some buildings have regular preventative extermination treatments, and in those cases the exterminator will go to every unit; that doesn't rely on electronic records. The exterminator will have a master key and will see all your criminal paraphernalia, and if they're remotely competent will report that to the rental company or property management company. And if you change your lock so the master key won't work? That gets reported even faster.
You're also going to have trouble if there are general maintenance projects, like a burst water pipe or a problem with the heating pipes/vents. It doesn't matter how well you maintain your own apartment -- you can't control what other tenants do in their spaces, and believe me, somebody will break something major sooner or later. Then maintenance will have to notify the tenants that they're coming in to do Project Y, and if nobody has a record of the tenants in Unit X? That's a problem. If maintenance can't work the lock? That's a problem. And so on.
If you want to disappear a property, you're much better off with something you own in full rather than something you rent. And not a condo, either -- then you'd be stuck with the condo association, which is just as nosy as a rental company or property management company. You want a freestanding house. This of course means you'll have to fuck around with tax rolls, and probably intercept tax assessments now and then, but that's much less of an ongoing problem than trying to Jedi mind trick a whole rental company.
But really, you don't want to make the apartment vanish. If you're going to steal an apartment, what you want to do is lease it as a perfectly normal tenant (possibly under a fake ID) and then pay your rent promptly and in full with money you've stolen from somewhere else. Much simpler and less stressful! And if you want to be all "yay computers!" about the thing, you can do leases entirely by email these days, and pay electronically; most rental companies are quite happy to facilitate that sort of thing.
...
I think too much about logistics sometimes.
Also, it's a lot easier to suspend disbelief over things I am unfamiliar with, as you can tell by the fact that I'm writing this post now instead of several years ago, when I first read the fic in question, but had not yet started working for a rental company. *wry*
If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)