An unattended apartment can raise red flags. A van however, in most jurisdictions even if you end up in a police checkpoint, they may not force you to reveal what is in your van.
The last three places I've lived, I'd never seen the residents of fully half the apartments on my floor. They could have been jam packed with SIM farms, or abandoned tigers, or dead hookers in chest freezers for all I or anyone else in the building knew or cared about.
An apartment where nobody bothers their neighbors or the super, but keeps the rent checks coming, is the absolute best case scenario for everyone involved.
And again - if an unattended apartment is raided, there's nobody there to drop names. You lose the investment, but that's likely a lesser problem than worrying about what Kasim is going to tell the cops once the handcuffs go on.
I was thinking about that for this scenario. Dude could easily have just paid rent in cash and never shared much (real) personal info with the landlord; literally what happened here is exactly what you posit.
