A conman who allegedly scammed nearly a dozen New York City tenants out of thousands of dollars with a bogus Hell’s Kitchen apartment rental was arrested Wednesday after turning himself in to police, according to authorities and sources.
Nicholas Fuelling, 43, was booked on 14 counts of grand larceny charges for allegedly swindling multiple hopeful tenants into renting out a $3,200 a month two-bed, two-bath apartment at 334 W. 47th St., police said.
Fuelling turned himself in to the police at the 18th precinct in Midtown Wednesday morning, according to sources.
Lured by the seeming steal in a prime Manhattan neighborhood, potential renters like 24-year-old Miguel Márchese signed paperwork and dropped thousands on the apartment advertised by Fuelling on Facebook.
Márchese told The Post he felt he had vetted Fuelling by checking his active social media presence, legitimate ID, and a DocuSign lease.
He signed the paperwork and forked over $6,400 for the first month’s rent and security deposit after an apartment tour and face-to-face meeting on Aug. 12.
“I saw the post and it was for $3,200 for the whole apartment – a two-bedroom, two-bath,” Márchese, an aspiring model who recently moved to the Big Apple, said in a phone interview.
“And I thought that was a really good deal…It seemed like a goldmine.”
But when Márchese made a Facebook post excitedly looking for a roommate, he got some bad news — somebody else had rented the apartment days earlier, and also paid Fuelling $6,400.
When they confronted Fuelling about it he initially tried to say it was all a misunderstanding, claiming that he’d forgotten to cancel showings while making other vague excuses.
Not buying it, the pair began recruiting their friends to reach out to Fuelling about the apartment.
“We kind of like played detective. Let’s just see if he forgot about it or something,” would-be tenant Maria Cordeiro told ABC7. “Three of our friends asked, ‘Hey is it still available?’ And he was like, ‘Yes do you wanna go see like today, tomorrow?’”
Once they felt they had enough evidence, the scorned renters reported the scam to the police.
The NYPD then launched a grand larceny investigation, and distributed wanted posters for Fuelling’s arrest.
But, Fuelling had vanished after the news of the investigation, and the NYPD told The Post in late August that no arrests or leads had been made in the case.
For reasons unknown, the real estate grifter decided to turn himself in this week.
His arrest marks the first time Fuelling, a California native, has been nabbed for a crime in the Big Apple, sources said.
Meanwhile, Márchese and the other would-be tenants have been left to pick up the pieces, with efforts to recover their stolen funds from Bank of America or Cash App mostly unsuccessful.
Council Member Erik Bottcher — whose district includes Hell’s Kitchen — spread Fuelling’s wanted poster around because a friend of his even fell victim to the scam.
“People just have to be really, really vigilant when subletting an apartment. The problem here is he was a master of deception,” Bottcher told PIX 11.
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