MANATEE COUNTY, Fla. (WFLA) – A bizarre rental scam backfired on crooks who entered into fake leases and took thousands of dollars from potential tenants.

Now, the scammers are the ones without a place to live.

“Up until the day we moved in here, we believed that everything was okay,” said Megan Hickman, who moved into the house after relocating with her boyfriend and four children.

When they showed up to rent the Bradenton house, the family was excited. They had already paid $4,500 and had keys to the house.

But they soon found out that two other families were in the same situation when another family showed up.

“They said, ‘Who are you and why are you moving in this house?’ And and I said, ‘My name is Megan and I’m moving in here.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’m supposed to move in tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘Did you pay $4,500, too?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I did,'” Hickman recalled.

Inside the home, they found evidence of even more victims.

“We actually found a notebook of names and the amounts they paid, dates they were supposed to move in, different people,” Hickman said.

They also found the drug den the crooks left behind. They showed a video to Better Call Behnken of pills, needles and drug paraphernalia.

“I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is real.’ It was rough. I had to have my mom and my stepdad come. We had to have a huge unit come in and clean up everything,” Hickman said.

The Manatee County Sheriff’s Office confiscated the drugs, cleaned up the needles and opened an investigation.

The landlords on the lease are Cerasela Rizzo and her husband Vincent Rizzo. During our interview, a third person showed up, claiming she actually owns the house and that she’s in a court battle over the house with her daughter.

Her theory is that the daughter made a last effort to make a lot of money on the house before she loses it for good.

The sheriff’s office told Hickman that she can stay for now because she has a lease. She could stay until she’s evicted.

But this is what she hopes will happen:

“I want to work something out to stay,” she said. “I don’t have anywhere else to go. I’ll clean up the house and pay whoever owns the house. I want to make this work.”

Meanwhile, the sheriff’s office has a lot of questions for the would-be landlords.