Weirdest scam ever or what?

"We found another apartment. No need to book your flight."

If you haven't already, you might want to tell your friend and the friend of the friend that it is a scam so that they stop using whatever source they got it from.

http://blogs.cars.com/safe/2007/12/escrow-fraud.html, including people who reported going through with it and having the money stolen. They were planning to scam you by getting the money from WU either by pleading their case ("I lost my wallet and ID and my friend sent me this money! See, they sent me a copy of the receipt!") or by faking some identification. Just stop communicating with them. Their scam depends on generating a high enough volume of leads that some people are bound to respond. They don't have time to retaliate against every person who catches wind of their scam.

Just to give you more of an idea of how these things work: as you probably figured, the terrible grammar and typos are a giveaway. Apparently, from what I've read, these folks deliberately make these things full of mistakes and sound ridiculous, because they only want the stupidest of people to reply to them (since they are the only ones who might fall for it). Everyone else is a waste of their time.

Please. No one flies from London to Geneva to show a flat. You ask a friend to do it for you, or the concierge, or an agent. It's unreasonable from the very beginning, never mind the low-quality English and the tortured transfer instructions.

Your name, address, and phone number are pretty publicly-available information. There's not anything the scammer could do with them now that they couldn't do at any time. You can email that you rented another place, thanks anyway, but retaliation is unlikely.

A good rule of thumb for any financial transaction (not done in person): decline the transaction the moment the seller or buyer mentions Western Union, unless you really and truly know that person.

I would under no circumstances ever rent an apartment sight unseen via the internet. Especially not in a city near where I already lived and could easily visit to hunt for apartments in person. Nobody is ever going to try to rent a real apartment in real life without showing it to prospective renters. I mean how do they plan to give you the keys? What happens if something ever breaks or goes wrong? Who handles maintenance on the building or admin related to collecting/depositing rent money? Even if this is legit, why would you want to rent from someone who lives in a different country, cannot get to the place quickly, and apparently doesn't have any kind of local representative? I mean shit what happens if the heat breaks or there's a leaky pipe? Your landlord guilts trips you about having to fly in from London to fix it? Oh, and mention of Western Union as a form of payment of anything at all ever for any reason, in an apartment rental context, is sketchy. Nope. The "receiver" thing is a red flag, too. Why would money be changing hands for any reason before you ever see the apartment? Why would you need to wire money anywhere if he's going to "refund" it if you decide not to take the place? Even if this is a legit person who really lives overseas and travels back and forth frequently enough that this is workable, what does that have to do with you and your money?

I simply want to know how he was planning to scam us. How? By forging an ID and retrieving the money. An the person may not even be in the UK. I think with Western Union, you can retrieve the money from anywhere. Good luck with your search.