Not every bad listing is a scam. A great many are simply dead. The unit went months ago, nobody took the advertisement down, and the number still rings. Both waste your day, and both are usually visible before you travel.
1. The price is well below everything else nearby
A place priced far under comparable units in the same area is either not what it appears to be, not available, or bait to start a conversation. Look at five other listings on the same road before you get excited about one.
2. The photographs are too good, or too few
Interiors shot with wide lenses and no exterior, no corridor, no view from the window, no kitchen. Or one photograph only. Photographs taken by someone who has stood in the unit tend to include the boring rooms. If you can, run an image search on a photograph. Recycled images turn up quickly.
3. Nobody will confirm the exact address
"I'll direct you when you arrive" is sometimes ordinary caution and sometimes a way of keeping you from checking whether the building exists. Ask for the estate, the road and a landmark. A genuine agent has no reason to withhold that.
4. Money is required before you see it
A viewing fee, a "site visit" charge, a reservation to hold the unit, asked for before you have stood inside. This is the clearest signal on the list. Legitimate money moves after a viewing, against an agreement, into a named account.
5. The urgency is manufactured
"Three other people are seeing it today." "The landlord needs the deposit tonight." Pressure that appears before trust does is a technique, not a market condition. Anything genuinely that competitive can survive you thinking about it for an hour.
6. Payment goes somewhere that can't be traced
A personal mobile number rather than an account in the agency's or landlord's name. No receipt, or a receipt that just says "payment received". Money that cannot be traced to a named party against a stated purpose is money you should assume is gone.
7. The listing has no evidence it is current
This is the quiet one. Ask a simple question: how does anyone know this unit is still available? On most listing sites, the answer is that somebody remembered to take it down, and often nobody did.
The last point is the fixable one
Dead listings are not a moral failing, they are a plumbing failure: the advertisement lives in a different system from the tenancy, so the two never learn about each other. The fix is for the listing to be published from the system that already knows when a unit has been let, so it can close itself the day someone moves in.
That is what Listings does for units on a live management system: they are published from the record that knows about the tenancy, so they close when the lease is signed rather than when somebody remembers. It cannot work that way for a plot or a house listed directly, because there is no tenancy to learn from, so those listers get asked to confirm instead. Wherever you are searching, the question is the same: before you travel, ask when it was last confirmed available, and by whom.
If nobody can answer that, the listing is not lying to you. It just doesn't know.