HONOLULU -- Housing and apartment rental scams have been appearing on Craigslist involving Hawaii properties.

It took KITV less than an hour to find two potential scams online.

Experts have two major warning signs: incredibly low rent for a nice place and no local phone number or contact information.

A couple of months ago, a family seeking a rental moved into an Aikahi Gardens townhouse after being duped into sending several thousand dollars to Nigeria by someone posing as the owner.

The actual owner could not believe it.

"I kind of peeked through the blinds and I saw all these boxes in the kitchen, and I backed out right away and called 911," homeowner Elene Tzetzos said.

KITV asked Malia Denis, a computer applications instructor, to find potential rental scams on Craigslist. It took only a few minutes before she found an ad asking only $900 to rent an upgraded four-bedroom home in Ewa Beach.

"It's a really good deal -- especially when you scroll down and see the photos. It's a really nice house. It's not a fixer-upper," Denis said.

The property owner told KITV it was a scam listing because she was actually renting the home for $2,800 a month. The owner said photos were posted on a management company's Web site, where the scammers had taken the information and photos.

For the next potential scam, Denis found a two-bedroom remodeled condo in Waikiki asking only $830 a month rent with everything included.

"When you're talking electricity and cable and that falls under the category of too-good-to-be-true," Denis said.

When she e-mailed the alleged owner saying she was interested she was asked to fill out a credit score rating online. That could lead to identity theft.

Anti-fraud lawyers said stay away from rentals that do not offer someone to speak to or meet locally. Many scammers ask you to wire money to another country. That is a major red flag.

"If someone's renting a property here, they're going to have an agent here or someone here that's going to want to do that. You generally don't want to be sending money to someone you're never going to meet with and you'll never going to be able to get that money back from," said Ryker Wada.

If you are a property owner with a place to rent, make your information less attractive to steal by not listing the exact number of the address.

"When you list the street address, you give the scammer a specific address to target," Denis said.

Also, imprint your photos with a phone number, the name of your company or some other watermark, so that they will be less attractive for scammers to take and use as their own.

If you are looking for a rental, experts said you should closely examine the photos to see if they are grainy or look a bit blurred. That could mean they were lifted from a legitimate ad.

If you have the property address, enter it in Google to see if you find other ads online for that same property with conflicting cost and contact information; then you know something is not right.