My entitled shady land or tries to scam me and my roommates out of money from our apartment,

taking money from me and everybody else in my building over something that was supposed to be

included in our lease. But karma eventually came back for him as he is now facing jail time

and quite possibly also get deported. Here's what happened. So this was seven years ago when I lived

in upstate New York. I had moved there for graduate school and I didn't know anyone. And this was

the first place I lived with roommates that I found on Craigslist. This was also the first place

I'd ever rented in my life with my name on the lease, where I was essentially responsible for myself.

The roommates I had were really shady and the place was a wreck. But hey, at least it was cheap,

right? I made a few friends in the first couple of months and by November, they were talking about

finding places for the following year, which is common in a lot of college towns. Three of my friends

found a place together and so I decided to find a place with my two other friends. We'll call them Pat

and Dora. These are not their real names. We look around for a little bit and we end up finding

a place a few houses down from our other three friends and we signed the lease in late November.

Like lots of the housing in this area, it's a house with two apartments, one upstairs and one

downstairs. And it's got a shared basement and garage and the landlord seems pretty swell too.

Included in our rent are snow removal and water. But the heat, power and internet are not.

In this area especially, this is pretty common as heat is expensive. Also chatting with the

landlord about this, he explains to us that to have separate billing for multi-unit housing,

you need to have separate meters for each unit and that's something that you legally need to have.

He goes on to say that for this and most properties, this is pretty easy to do for electric,

but a lot harder and expensive to do for water, which is why most multi-unit places include the water.

So it's kind of a sneaky workaround if you think about it. The school year comes and goes and we

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