Is SWG Freiberg Legit? They say they have money for me.

The names of people you don't know are the biggest red flag here. A real company wouldn't need permission from strangers to pay you your own deposit back. They'd just send the money to whoever was on the lease.

Another odd detail is the "RUNDUM LEBENSWERT" header. That's a generic marketing slogan, not something an official Aktiengesellschaft would put on a serious financial letter about a 1,400 euro payout. Their actual official correspondence would look more boring and use their full registered name.

If you want to be thorough, look up SWG Freiberg's real phone number yourself and call their Mieterabteilung directly. Don't use the contact info from the letter. They'll tell you this is a scam, and you can toss the letter.

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This is a known scam pattern in Germany. SWG Freiberg is a real company, but the letter is fake - real housing companies don't send out mass letters asking for Vollmachten from random former roommates. The "someone I don't know" names are a dead giveaway that they scraped your address from old records or data leaks.

If you're worried, call SWG Freiberg directly at their official number from their website, not the one in the letter. They'll confirm they never sent this. Forward the letter to your local police's cybercrime unit if you want, but mostly just throw it away.

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Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.

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if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point

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honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.

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