What are my rights

As a first consideration, I’d be interested to know whether the man considers himself an agent of the landlord.  Often, landlords use property managers to deal with the day to day and just get a check from the property manager.  However, without reviewing the lease, I really can’t say.  Now, if your daughter did get caught up in a situation where a con man has commandeered an abandoned (or foreclosed) home, that’s a different story…and it does happen more often than you’d think.  If the tax man is putting notice that the home is going up for sale, it lends me to think it could be a foreclosure property – one that’s either in the process or is lost in the process.  In the end, it doesn’t really matter because if he is neither the owner nor an agent of the owner, he cannot rent out the property because he has no legal rights to the property.  So, in that case, your legal obligation to pay him rent wouldn’t exist because the lease is void from the beginning.  In fact, you’d have a suit for the money you paid him (except it’s unlikely you’d even be able to find him after calling his bluff).  On the bad side, if it is a scam, it means you’re daughter would now be a squatter and the actual owners could come back file what’s called an ejectment.  Here’s the long short to this situation – have your daughter take the lease agreement and any other correspondence to an attorney for review.  An attorney will be able to help connect the dots, and, if it is a scam, help clean up the mess.