Jones is ailing and out of work and her daughter was eight months pregnant at the time. The $3,000 they had for rent and security deposit was a gift from a family member; there was no more where it came from.

"We know there's a lot of people out there who are flim-flam artists and we didn't want to get involved in no real life drama," Jones said.

So they checked city records on the two-story brick rowhouse, and it seemed as if everything was on the up and up. But the caution turned out to have been for naught.

Kia Morrison, the woman who rented them the property on Edgewood Street near Elmwood Avenue, had lost it at sheriff's sale three months earlier.

It was a fact they hadn't uncovered in their research - and a fact they said Morrison didn't disclose.

The real owner is Wells Fargo Bank, which - despite pleas from a city official - is evicting them along with the infant who was born in the meantime.

"This is a bad place to be," Jones said.

"We have a two-month-old baby here. I'm ill. My daughter is struggling, trying to get back to work. It's horrendous."

This kind of rental scam has always been part of the city landscape, as desperate low-income families are defrauded by heartless predators who take money for property they pretend to own.

But, with skyrocketing real estate values and condo conversions going on all over the city, the situation is getting worse by the day.

"I think it's becoming increasingly common," said Phil Lord, of the Tenant Union Representative Network.

"I hadn't seen it that much before. Now I'm seeing it on a weekly basis."

And the perpetrators easily get away with it.

They usually can't be found. And the short-staffed district attorney's office has a $50,000 threshold on prosecutions of economic crime.

That leaves people like Wilhelmina Jones and her family with nowhere to turn.

It's going to get worse instead of better: The financially strapped Philadelphia Housing Authority is considering selling hundreds, if not thousands, of its scattered-site properties, making affordable homes that much more scarce and vulnerable families that much more desperate.

While tenants can protect themselves by asking a landlord for a Certificate of Rental Suitability - which would confirm he or she is the actual owner and that the property is free of serious code violations - they rarely do.

Chances are, it might keep a tenant out of the position that Jones and her daughter, Janaya Pulliam, find themselves in.