20 Tenants With A Vengeance Describe How They Got Back At Their Landlords

Posted by u/greenvortex:

My landlord was sued by a lady who slipped on ice because he never cleared the sidewalks, and then he became super cheap. He raised everyone's rent, so I decided to move. I was all cleared out by 1:00 pm on the last day of the lease, which said I had to be out by noon. Citing this, he kept my entire security deposit. Six months later, in the middle of the night, I stopped by and turned on an outside faucet that drained into the off-limits basement he used as personal storage. Since he only came by every few weeks, I suspect that the water completely filled the basement before he found out.

Posted by u/kickbackheaven:

A couple decades ago,  I was renting a house in the Seattle area, and my landlord was a terrible property management company. I had a lot of arguments with them, but when I moved out, I cleaned the whole house, and nothing had been damaged. Regardless, they decided to keep my $850 deposit, plus they had the gall to say I owed them an additional $10 for "cleaning costs." Right at the time I was a target of a violent crime, and I had to move for reasons related to that. I didn't have the time or energy to argue with them about the $860 dollars, and I'd been hospitalized. Feeling beleaguered, I took the first apartment I could afford, and it had cockroaches. I hadn't noticed them when I was looking at the place, but after I moved in, I saw them. I felt devastated, so many bad things piling up on me. That's when I got an idea.

I started to catch the cockroaches in a jar and save them. After about a week, I had a good number of live cockroaches in my jar, so I drove down to the property management office to pay the $10. In the lobby, the secretary asked what I needed and I replied that "I thought I owed them some money, but wasn't sure how much." The secretary got up and left the lobby to find my file, leaving me totally alone. At that point, I opened my backpack, took out the jar of roaches, opened it, and let them scurry away. Within seconds, they has disappeared under floorboards and furniture. A moment later, the secretary came out and said, "Oh, yes. You owe us $10."

I paid them and left with a big smile on my face. Petty revenge? Yes. Do I feel guilty? NO.

Posted by u/RandomRavenclaw87:

My friend had a long-term lease on a home (five years) which stipulated that he has to repaint every room the day he moved out. So he found popular neutral paint colors, hired a handyman, and had the place freshly painted the day before his moving truck showed up.

Well, his landlord showed up waving their contract, yelling. The wording said the DAY he moved out, not the day BEFORE. The landlord was convinced that the movers would scuff up the walls. He wanted the house left pristine. He really was ready to take the case to court.

My friend was crushed. Between painting, moving, and the deposit on his new place, he had no money to repaint or to go to court. I was furious with this landlord. I went to the house and saw the paint job was fine, not scuffed. So I met up with him at night, and, per his contract, we repainted every wall. SOLID BLACK. We even did some ceilings.

Posted by u/NotEconomicallyViabl

They were first-time landlords... They lived about an hour away and told us to p*ss off whenever we asked about things they promised to take care of.

And then the mice problem started. They ate through a collector's item backpack that I had and tore some of the labels from our vintage wines. They got into our cabinets, and it was just hell! We basically did not eat at home because we were so disgusted. I called them and called them about the mice problem, but to no avail. They simply told us to get some poison and put it around the house. Well, according to our state laws, that's their responsibility. We say that, and they basically tell us to p*ss off again...

So, revenge mode on.

The mice problem started about a month or two before we moved out, and they were trying to get it rented out as soon as we left. So, every time they asked to enter the house to show it off to potential renters, we would leave the mice traps and mice poison EVERYWHERE in plain sight. You had to step over them to get into the living room, bedrooms, etc.

But the real treat came as we said goodbye to that house. We took granola bars (which we determined was the mice's favorite treats, since they ate through our supply) and dropped them all over the vents and basement. A few month's supply for them.

Hope you enjoy your new tenants. Except they pay no rent! Mwahaha.

Posted by u/gramses_0-0:

I had a bad landlord once. He refused to fix windows that were broken before I moved in, and the place was basically just a sh*thole owned by a slumlord. Luckily, I was able to take him to small claims court for a number of reasons, and I ended up getting my next six months paid for at my next apartment.

There was a small trapdoor in the closet floor to access shut-off valves for the plumbing, so before I moved out, I got scrap meat from a local butcher (stuff they can’t sell) and placed it in the trapdoor. A few months later, the place gets condemned due to vermin infestation and gets torn down.

This was also before cell phones, so a couple times I got my female friend to call his house when I knew he wasn’t home. His wife would answer, my friend would ask for him, act nervous, and hang up.

Posted by u/Send-me-ur-n00dz:

I had a landlord that ripped us off for our security deposit... The apartment that we moved to after was also run by them (we signed the lease before they screwed us). We lived there for two years and acted as if we were going to sign for a third. The deadline for the lease came and went, and I never turned it in, so they just assumed that we would be staying because at this point, we had been renting from them for three years. Then I bought a house with a month left to go on our lease. I moved with no notice and ghosted them.

Because we live in a college town, where students need to secure their housing by summer time, they couldn’t find anyone to rent it. Pretty much every lease in our city runs from June to late May. It sat empty for 11 months. They screwed me out of a grand, I screwed them out of about 14 grand.