In my opinion, Spareroom is a very untrustworthy website. I have been in touch with * from their site moderation team about a potentially bad agent. This agent currently seems to not be returning the deposits of tenants, engages in bad trade practices, the agent's website contains malware according to a major antivirus software, and they seem linked to another expelled agent. However, Spareroom only defends the agent with the risk of infecting the tenant's computers or of them losing money as they likely get ad revenue. Spareroom has been acting more like a spokesperson for the agent and not as a platform concerned with tenants' well-being.
**UPDATE**
Following the Spareroom representative's response, I checked my inbox and spam folders and there was no response from Spareroom about contact information for a UK authority. Even if this email did not reach my inbox, the readers of this review can make up their own mind about Spareroom's practices and advertisers based on them having to provide information to UK authorities about their own advertisers that Spareroom seem to be still willingly keeping at this point. In my perspective, the platform needs to do a much better job keeping tenants away from such agents.
*Personal information redacted by admin
UK ONLY
Hi Rosen,
Thanks for your review. Our UK team have been in contact with the relevant UK authorities as part of their investigation, which is not yet concluded as per their reply to you. As an advertising portal, we may only remove an advertiser where there is sufficient evidence that they may not operate on our site. Advertisers are removed where this is is the case once an investigation has been completed. We can see we've provided contact information for a UK authority regarding the unrelated suspicions you may have about them or their website, which as we've confirmed would need to be taken up directly with the authority as it is not something related to or occurring within our own systems. Our moderators will be happy to talk to you again about your report and can be contacted on 0161 768 1162 or at site.moderator@spareroom.co.uk.
Best wishes
The SpareRoom Team